Will the iPad save newspapers? Professor Terry Flew Head of New Media Services Work Program Creative Industries Faculty, QUT, Brisbane 21 April 2010
Will the iPad save newspapers?Professor Terry Flew
Head of New Media Services Work Program
Creative Industries Faculty, QUT, Brisbane21 April 2010
Terry Flew New Media Services and QUT2
The Problem
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Terry Flew New Media Services and QUT3
The Problem #2
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Terry Flew New Media Services and QUT4
The challenge: from this …
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Terry Flew New Media Services and QUT5
to this …
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Terry Flew New Media Services and QUT6
… to this?
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Terry Flew New Media Services and QUT7
The iPad as saviour?
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Terry Flew New Media Services and QUT8
But not everyone is convinced
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How to research this question?
• Limits of quantitative surveys: people will seek “faster horses” i.e. what they have with one identifiable improvement (faster, lighter, cheaper etc.) – tells us little about disruptive innovations
• Issue is not predicting sales (diffusion of innovation curve) or gauging consumer reaction (technology S-curve) – these can be predicted
• Issue is how to gauge what patterns on use are likely to be
• This requires disaggregated qualitative analysis
Terry Flew New Media Services and QUT10
Job mapping
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Terry Flew New Media Services and QUT11
Key research questions
• Which demographics will adopt which use patterns with the iPad - e.g. will people use it to read on the bus or train?
• What other devices are on the horizon – problem of lock-in to single digital mobile devices?
• Relationship between content and masthead (has become blurred in era of Google)
• Relationship to third party apps• Design functionality or user interaction?
Terry Flew New Media Services and QUT12
Back to the future?
• Main criticism of iPad (other than lack of a camera!) has been that it promotes read-only rather than read-write
• This can be seen as its strength in publishing, as it re-establishes the world of print in digital space
• Unresolved questions around media/device specificity of news organisations and their internal operating environment
• Don’t start from “Will people pay for it?” – important question, but huge range of “it depends” issues surround it