Can Apple's Tablet Help Print Media?

With all the hype about one of Apple's latest gadgets, the Tablet, many people involved with print media are wondering how it will affect them. A lot of rumors have been flying about this new product, and according to a story in Business Week all that Apple has said officially is that it plans to release a "tablet-based device in early 2010." It would also have an advanced touch screen and be close to the size of a MacBook.

In a recent article posted by Vadim Lavrusik, he discusses his opinion on the Tablet. His hopes are that it will make mobile news more user friendly, force news publishers to become more innovative in their site design, and create a potential for users to be willing to pay for this new content. He fears though that many news businesses will not be quick enough to adapt to this technology and that publishers will try to use it to boost their print sales. We also must not forget that many users are not willing to pay much (or at all) for a lot of this content, so profits from these new mobile sites will not be very large.

Print media's history of accepting changes in technology has not been a good one. With the advent of the internet many of these companies did not see the importance of posting news articles online, and lost many younger readers because of it. We simply do not have the time or patience any longer to sit and read a newspaper. Slowly the news media has caught up, and newspapers like USA Today and even The Des Moines Register have Twitter feeds. If print media throws everything it has into creating more user-friendly and interactive sites for the technology in products like the Tablet I have no doubt that they will succeed in getting more tech-savvy readers, and maybe even profit from it.

As part of a new generation of media consumers that rarely picks up a newspaper, I am excited for this new technology. We want to not only read the news, but to be able to have pictures, video, and audio to go along with it. We want to be able to ask questions and have them be answered by the reporter or blogger quickly. We want to leave our own opinions about an article and comment on the opinions of others. If print media accepts this early enough they will be able to reconnect with a seemingly lost generation of news readers.