Is ‘USA Today’ newspaper, US newspapers today?

Can iPad really take you new places? The weekend ‘USA Today’ lifestyle feature poses a good question: Because it depends on where you’re coming from… and where you want to end up. ‘USA Today’ unrolls like sheets off a restroom tissue roll: It’s 280 mm wide now, but with the 560 cut-off, an uneven fold and pages floated into a mass of white space (53 mm in all) at head and foot, it feels like something other than a twenty-first century newspaper. And yes, the pages are soft and absorbent. Not white and bright, though. It’s grey and slightly grubby with OK process colour on barely more than the covers of the four eight and 12-page sections (there’s more, but only for advertisements). I was going to call them ‘broadsheet’ but palpably they’re not that, and anyone who thinks there’s as much value in a 44” web as a 55”, or even 50” one is kidding themself. If this is where are we coming from, I’d say it’s no wonder we’re in trouble. I’m in Orlando for the Newspaper Association of America’s relaunched mediaXchange event, which opens at the Hilton on Monday. But I’m in a motel across the road with the ‘white trash’, and Steve Jobs’ technology – no Apple iPad as yet – is a lifesaver. Free wireless internet is everywhere and, despite the moans of a guy sitting on the motel steps with his laptop, is fast and functional. Its (paid) equivalent worked in the airports and some of the planes here, on both my laptop and iPhone, providing news, information, directions and email … and the opportunity to post this story. I don’t mean to pick on ‘USA Today’, but the issue is still around although it’s Saturday evening now (and lunchtime Sunday at home) and carries the same stories as the ‘Australian’ which I had picked off the drive before leaving for the airport on Friday morning. A ‘USA Weekend’ magazine – which claims a 22 million circulation across 700 newspapers – is published, but it’s not around. What I had was something to look at over supper but, barring the professional interest, not much. It’s hard not to correlate the grey wad of soft absorbent newsprint with the state in which the once-proud US newspaper industry finds itself. And it would take a pretty soft, absorbent brain to think that it can go on like this. It’s not as if I’m buying the paper for news, is it? Nor are the locals, all of whom are armed with mobiles of one form or another, and have plasma screens wherever they go. And there’s not a lot of entertainment in the unwieldy 40 pages of indifferently-printed grey matter. Its redeeming feature is the US$1 inclusive cover price… and that’s something in a town where there’s ten per cent tax (and a ten per cent tip) on the quoted price of most things though thankfully, only another ten per cent to convert the total to Australian dollars at the moment. But at home in the Asia-Pacific, a market I wouldn’t presume to suggest was much more sophisticated than America’s takes for granted print production standards that come close to those of glossy magazines. It’s one of the factors which contradict those who say newspapers in Australia – and perhaps South East Asia – will go the way of their American cousins; going back to grubby print quality would not appear to be an option. Where will it all end up? Plastic flags warning that fibre optic cable has been laid under the nature strip are a guide. Bandwidth, already generous by comparison with that we’re used to, is ramping up. So it seems is the excitement over the iPad user experience. By the time Friday’s ‘USA Today’ got the news from Jobs, they’d sold 450,000 of them and that wouldn’t, unfortunately, be the latest figure. Online is already a potentially deeper and more satisfying experience than the local print media. And by all accounts, the iPad is not just highly-portable: It’s clear, bright and fast. My mealtime read was none of those things… and from being the bright hope of national publishing in the 1980s, looked destined to follow other dinosaurs into history. A fear would be that it may be too late to turn the tide; habits are changing, and I don’t see a lot of hope for publishers whose priorities get in the way of putting colourful, bright and entertaining publications in front of readers who have other demands on their time. Yes, they’re getting more involved in the online space, but mostly without the advantages of companies which have experience in delivering the TV and video content (for instance) now envisaged. Those which catch up still stand to make more from peripheral activities and applications than from news publishing. I can’t comment on the history of the local industry: I’m told the lack of investment in product leads from excessive gearing and too much having been taken out of businesses in the past. And of a stranglehold organised labour still has on many publishers. It won’t/can’t last. Things may get marginally better as the economy improves, but it seems printed newspapers here – or at least, many of these still existing – are in a spiral from which there is no recovery. The best they can do is to sell up (or go bust) soon enough for newer ideas to have a chance. A few, morphing into daily news magazines, may last longer than the rest, but with the iPad marking the latest development in the mobile revolution, it’s hard not to be discouraged and to see contemporary daily print publishing as a substantial opportunity… lost. Maybe, just maybe this week’s mediaXchange can help change that. Peter Coleman