This week I’m working on a plan to get some Apple iPads into the hands of students in Fall 2010 through SJMC courses. If you haven’t heard of the Apple iPad, you weren’t paying attention to the commercial aired during the Oscars last night:
It’s been called a souped-up iPod Touch, a reinvented NetBook, a new paradigm for computing, and — coming from Apple — the Next Big Thing. But what might it do for media? Here’s a presentation from a major global publisher which hints at some possibilities:
Today’s debate: Will the iPad save media? Will it kill media? Will it affect news distribution or message campaigns? Will it matter?
My thinking is that the iPad will not kill any media on its own, but it may save some. By that, I mean that there are a lot of traditional media, primarily in print, that will likely die off with their aging audiences. (Farewell, Reader’s Digest.) But forward-thinking magazine publishers (i.e. Conde Nast) may well see the iPad and things like it as their salvation. To be able to digitally simulate the experience of reading a magazine… to be able to flip through pages and stop on things interesting… is a pleasure some people likely will hope to still do even in a post-paper world. Kindle has staked out that claim for books, and the iPad promises to be able to do that in a far richer way that should be able to deliver the same experience as reading a beautifully printed magazine.
From a hardware perspective, I’m thinking small “netbooks” are the thing that iPads will most likely damage in terms of sales and market share, followed by Kindle and other e-readers.