I say again, let us pay. Make the process as easy as possible. Make it invisible and transparent. Make us register once and once only. Walls are not the way forward, but walls are not the same thing as payment, and without some form of payment, the press will not be here in five years’ time. (more…)

The real loser here is the middle take. This is what the weeklies like Time and Newsweek have historically offered: reportage and essays produced a few days after major events, with a bit of analysis sprinkled on top. They’re neither fast enough to be conversational nor slow enough to be truly deep. The Internet has essentially demonstrated how unsatisfying that sort of thinking can be.

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Byrne’s solution [...] is to create the role of a digital producer who resides in editorial but acts as a liaison between development and editorial. Keeping the job editorially focused is important because the technical side lacks an overarching understanding of all the moving parts, such as how editorial works with the business side[.]

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It’s never been print vs. web – it’s attention vs. apathy. A bunch of people who care about the same thing is the most powerful, rare, and wonderful thing in the universe. It doesn’t matter how they find each other – web, print, a great disturbance in the force – it only matters that they find each other, and that they can do something with that shared attention to make the world a better place.

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When the iPhone first appeared, followed by the Kindle and then the iPad, it became clear that e-books and apps provided a way to siphon the resources of the Internet to individuals, who could now sample that energy without having to be vulnerable to the Web’s commercialism. That was an enormous breakthrough. Anyone who’s honest with herself knows that the Web stopped being a great place for consumers of culture a year or two ago. (more…)

I think that FT.com managing director Rob Grimshaw sums it up best, and in a way that should make all news publishers pause and re-think.

“Where we’ve found inspiration is Internet retail, not publishing,” he told me last week. “We’re becoming a direct Internet retailer and we have to have expertise to do that. When you do that with publishing, it looks like a different business.”

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This wave has two faces. One is the trend towards more minimal, readable designs. The other is the imperative to make content as easily reformattable as possible, separating content from the designs in which it’s initially clothed.

You can see it at work in tools like Instapaper and Readability. You can see it in applications like Flipboard, which filter and reformat news through the lens of your social network. (more…)

But right now there is only one electronic device that can genuinely be said to support a news organisation. It has two large screens, its own keyboard layout and it takes a fortnight to learn to use properly. It’s called a Bloomberg terminal.

via Can apps save news journalism? | Adrian Monck | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

Sometimes readers will want to engage with a particular story in the calm, uncluttered space an iPad affords, with no distractions and with the content front and center. Other times, they may want to read things — as we increasingly do — in the midst of a busy hub of data. That should be the reader’s choice, not the publisher’s. (more…)