iMedia Connection - ad:tech blog

I'll bet that practically every blog publisher out there is likely guilty of fantasizing about the day when his or her little publication unseats king media and gains mainstream awareness and respectability. Meanwhile, traditional publications are being urged to write their obituaries ahead of time. But perhaps traditional print media has a new lifeline that may not only allow The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and its contemporaries to stick around, but to thrive?

It’s entirely possible that the fatal flaw of print in the digital era – lack of scarcity -- may be a reversible condition. At least, that’s the way Wired Magazine’s Editor in Chief, Chris Anderson, is choosing to view things these days. In fact, he sees the current state of media as being at the most interesting inflection point he’s ever experienced.

So what has him more optimistic than the rest of the blogosphere? The era of the iPad and its tablet computing brethren.

In his keynote address at ad:tech San Francisco, Anderson admitted to being initially skeptical about the iPad – so many tablets that had come before had failed to take off. But Anderson soon recognized that three things had fundamentally changed since the last wave of touch-screen enabled computing devices:

1. The iPhone had shown there is a massive market for  apowerful rich media touch screen dev ice. Its success as an app platform and its power to divert consumption to the “freemium” model reset our sense of default interaction with devices.
2. The success of the Kindle, which offered consumers a glimpse of a more flexible, convenient distribution model for content.
3. The cloud. As our lives became more hosted, tablet devices no longer needed to be as powerful, or have as much storage space, which makes them more enabled (light, thin clients).

Though Anderson couldn’t yet share a view of how Wired plans to take advantage of the iPad to change the way publishers can drive engagement and monetize content, he did announce that Wired is working with Adobe to create an entirely new publishing process for the tablet era, which he hopes will launch this summer. This process would not be a one-off app, but rather a whole process that makes sense in a way that the web has never made sense for magazines to date.

"If we get this right, and figure out how to use this, I think we can reset the economics on both the production and content side," said Anderson. "For the first time in my career, I can see a path to a 21^st century magazine business that makes as much sense, if not more than, that of the 20^th Century because of a platform that lets us do what we do best, with the economy of digital."

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