What Tablets Might Change – and What They Won’t
Jason Fry |
Dec. 21, 2009 9:01 a.m.
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Those 190 seconds didn’t happen on the field, though – that’s how long it takes to watch Time Inc.’s video demo of Sports Illustrated as imagined for a tablet computer. (If you missed it, see it here.) The demo, created by Time and the Wonderfactory and narrated by SI editor Terry McDonell, is flashy, but it’s also compelling. Sure, the viewer sees all sorts of bells and whistles, from magazine pages that can be reordered on the fly to bits of swimsuit video (you knew that would be included, right?) to live game alerts. But it also feels like something you could imagine yourself reading and exploring, and it feels true to Sports Illustrated – a comfortable extension of the magazine instead of an awkward adaptation of it.
Since its debut earlier this month, the tablet demo has become famous in media circles. Together with an earlier demo by Condé Nast, it’s sparked debate about the market for e-readers, the details of Apple’s long-rumored tablet computer and what publishers might know about it, and left media prognosticators wondering if tablet computers could provide a new business model for magazines and newspapers whose margins have been savaged by the transition to the Web.
I’ve been thinking about all that too, and trying to balance my enthusiasm for the world hinted at in the SI demo with skepticism about what won’t change.
My first reaction was to remind myself to beware of video demos. By their nature, such demos only show things at their best. In a demo, you’ll never see anything crash, run afoul of a misconfigured feature, or spend time on a dull page. But that’s not quite fair. For one thing, the SI demo seen in the video really exists – Time has let media types play with it on a laptop, to laudatory reviews. More importantly, what SI is showing isn’t a Web site, which is always running to catch up with itself. Rather, readers would download an issue to their tablets much as we download apps to our smartphones. A (mostly) self-contained product like this one offers its creator a lot more quality control – readers shouldn’t encounter stuttering video, 404 pages or other least-favorite Web experiences.
I also think that magazines have built-in advantages as tablet products. The quality of magazine photos and advertisements hasn’t translated very well to the Web, and online you lose the tactile pleasure of paging through a magazine and feeling immersed in it. The tablet’s screen, size and shape should offer a much better match for magazine reading than computer monitors or smartphones. And there’s another pleasure to a magazine (or a physical newspaper): You can read through it and know you’re done. Between the endless flood of news and the depth of the Web, reading online can be unsettling – you generally wind up feeling that you’ve run out of time, rather than that you actually finished exploring something. An app comes with different expectations.
Finally, there’s the possibility that consumers will be more amenable to paying for journalism on a tablet than they have been about handing over money on the Web. It’s too early to make big bets here, but consumers have proved willing to pay for smartphone apps, and those habits may make online-news apps money makers in ways Web sites haven’t been. That’s a bit of potential good news for an industry that will take whatever scraps of optimism it can find.
Still, we should be wary of regarding tablets as some kind of game-changer.
E-readers, which share the same general size and shape of tablets, have attracted a lot of hype, with Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony all pushing products as must-have Christmas gifts and Apple still to be heard from. But it’s still too early to say definitively that there will be a critical mass of consumers who’ll see the necessity of adding a magazine-sized electronic device to the roster of desktop PC, laptop and smartphone/handheld. I think tablets will succeed, probably at the expense of laptops, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on that quite yet.
Second, what might work for magazines is a lot less likely to work for newspapers. Even with newspapers shrinking, they’re not a perfect fit for tablets – and besides the size mismatch, newspapers are less rich visually than magazines, must be produced much more quickly, and are seen as more disposable by readers.
Then, finally, there’s the fact that tablet offerings like SI’s can’t just be viewed as potential replacements for print products. They will have to compete for people’s time and attention with the Web and its firehose of real-time content. SI may make a wonderful tablet magazine, but if it isn’t at least a gateway for the latest news, it will never be more than a niche product. By its very nature, content produced in near-real time can’t be as easily controlled or as lushly presented as the other stuff the SI demo shows.
Which brings us to the craft of sportswriting. It’s possible that tablets will succeed and fatten the thin bottom lines of companies that employ sportswriters. I certainly hope they will. But even then, readers will still demand real-time updates and insights – which publishers may still struggle to make money from. Readers will still want traditional “finished” takes on teams and games and athletes, delivered on devices of their choice. And, increasingly, readers will expect to interact with writers through comments, discussion forums and social media. Tablets won’t replace any of the duties sportswriters now have – if anything, they’ll just add new demands to the mix. Which is a rule of the digital age: When asked to pick between ways of accessing information; readers’ answer is usually “all of the above.”
Jason Fry is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing (www.faithandfearinflushing.com), and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom (www.reinventingthenewsroom.com). Write to him at jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jason.fry, or follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jasoncfry.
