The Macalope was shocked earlier this week to hear that The Daily , Rupert Murdoch ’s gamey - profile mag for lozenge , would be ending its run as of December 15th .
aghast because he had thought for sure it had been discontinue months ago .
With this news , it was only a affair of time before someone blamed it on the iPad instead of …
“ The impossibility of tablet - native journalism ”
And there we go . Yes , Felix Salmon want you to know it ’s unsufferable to do tablet - native news media ! Ca n’t ! Be ! Done !
for certain he has some good reasons to think this . Or , barring that , at least some funny one . rationality so wrong that they are laugh - out - loud hilarious .
… I think that The Daily has teach us all an important lesson — which is that tablets in general , and the iPad in particular , are actually much less powerful and rotatory than many of us had hop-skip .
Or was the real rotation supposed to be taking place inside ourselves all along ?
Specifically , far from being able to offer richer substance than can be get hold on the web , they actually find themselves crippled in unexpected way .
Reaaaaally .
news show apps , it has become clean-cut , are gawky and unwieldy thing .
Most of them are . But whose mistake is that ?
Every offspring of a novel issue has to be download in full before it can be opened .
in reality , no ! Not at all ! That ’s just how they ’re often implemented by short - sighted news organizations . The standard comic book apps from Marvel , DC , and others do n’t force you to download the whole issue first . Buy an outlet and you could open up it almost immediately . The first Thomas Nelson Page has to load , but while you ’re reading the rest of the proceeds can be download in the background .
There ’s no reason why cartridge clip apps could n’t work the same direction . They just do n’t because it was belike easy to implement them that way . That ’s not the geological fault of tablet or the iPad in particular , that ’s the fault of news show system and developers . Benjamin Jacksonhas some other model , but Salmon assume that the way many ( but not all ) newspaper and magazine apps were rag is how all of them must be coded .
On top of that , the iPad ’s aboriginal architecture is hard tighten in many way . appear at any publication you ’re reading in an iPad app , and search for a level . Oh , wait — you ca n’t : search is basically unimaginable within iPad apps , which at heart are little more than heavy PDF files , weighed down with multimedia system bells and whistling .
Uh , no . As Jackson remark , some news apps do have hunt and the PDF - heavy computer architecture used by many is a design pick of the developers , not something required by the platform .
Again , take any native iPad publication at all . Read to the end of a story , and then see how many newspaper headline you’re able to select : which stories are you being give the choice to take next ? The result is in all probability none , and again the reason for that is built deep into the architecture of the iPad , and of other tab too .
Is Salmon conducting a art object of performance art here , trying to see how many time a somebody can be demonstrably wrong in one article ? If you study to the final stage of an article in theNew York Timesapp and tap the bottom you ’ll see the number is 13 more than none . Which , confessedly , is penny-pinching to none , in the mother wit that numbers racket extend to infinity .
I ’m reminded , here , a bit of Apple ’s iOS mapping debacle .
Of naturally you are .
Similarly , when the iPad launched , it admit people to do thing they could never do with a photographic print publication : watch videos , say .
Which is part of the problem . Slapping a 30 - sec video of someone simplysayingwhat ’s already in the article is not an improvement . The veridical benefits come from improve the reading experience by rethink navigation and taking vantage of the touch interface . Too few publications have done that .
But at the same fourth dimension the experience was still inferior to what you could get on the web , which iterate and improves incrementally every day .
There is no grounds aboriginal tablet apps could n’t do on the button the same thing in a more commodious form component for reading with an user interface that remove advantage of touch gestures . It ’s up to the publications to rethink the manner of speaking , something few of them have been either prepared or unforced to do .
No iPad publication is remotely as innovative or as fun to read as , say , BuzzFeed , because BuzzFeed has coders who can do very canny things with their chosen platform , and iPad publications do n’t .
Yes , don’t . Not ca n’t , do n’t .
The Daily was Rupert Murdoch ’s attempt to get a head commence in the new spiritualist , but in this case the medium simply is n’t well enough to get traction : the only iPad - native content which has work really well has been games .
Games have worked out the best , but ask small publishers like Marco Arment if he ’s consume any succeeder withThe Magazine . Short answer : “ Yes . ” Long answer : “ YESSSSSSS ! ” while throwing money in the air . ( revelation : The Macalope has been pay for to conduce to The Magazine , so he hopes to soon be arse - deep in tab - publishing lucre . Wait , that came out weird … )
As far as word and journalism are bear on , the verdict is in : tablets are n’t a new medium which will support a whole new class of publications — there ’s almost nothing you could do well on a lozenge that you ca n’t just put on a website and ask the great unwashed to read in a web browser .
And who does n’t want to be sit upright at a desk when reading ? Did Johannes Gutenberg cook up movable type so you shirker could dwell on the couch with an iPad ? Certainly not !
Salmon at leastseems to have recognizedat least a little how weapons - tier wrong this slice was :
I prise the people who hate my piece on tab - native journalism much more than the people who like it . Hm .
When you could publish a tablet magazine on the number of things ill-timed with your clause on tablet magazines , you might need to rethink your logical system .
