CAN Apple be the savior of newspapers?

The yet unnamed and possibly fictional device from Apple has been called many things from a dedicted eBook reader, a larger iPod Touch/ iPhone data device, to an all purpose OS X in your pocket kind of thing. Apple rarely has made single-purpose devices (especially since Jobs returned) and IF this tablet will eventually end up being sold in the Apple Store, it most likely won’t be just for reading books.

All over the world, newspapers and magazines are folding and with them some of the best ways to create and aggregate news and information. Without some way for magazines and newspapers to monitize their online content, they’re going to die. Inline advertising on their web sites hasn’t been enough to make up for the shortfall. While it would be great if all content was free, quality does cost unless you expect to get all your news from “some guy’s blog”. Online subscriptions to this content could be the savior that many are looking for. There are already ways that many do this, but so far everyone has their own method and like music and video there needs to be a single way to make it happen which is what it took for the latter to really take off in a significant way.

Imagine getting up in the morning and having the New York Times or Washington Post (or the Podunk Herald-Tribune/Registar) loaded into your unspecified device ready for your consumption. It can be interactive with links to other sources, video interviews, ways to specify that you want more information on some topic to upload as it becomes available. You can make RSS feeds do some of this but for most people this is beyond the amount of time they want to spend to gather information. It needs to be uncomplicated. It needs to be simple. It needs to be an easy to grasp way of interacting with content beyond what we currently use the internet for. In other words, it needs to pass the grandma test. If grandma can do it, any one can. Apple already has done this with other content (like music and video), but this goes beyond what they’ve attempted before.

Now having said that, is yet another portal in iTunes for content the solution? iTunes is already becoming massive and difficult to find the things you’re looking for. Not to mention that version 9 is slower on my C2D 2.16GHz iMac with beach balls becoming the norm as I switch from one portion of the app to another. It’s even worse on Windows. What could Apple use to allow ordinary people to find, subscribe, and pay for this content AND allow old-school publishers a chance to revitalize their business in a way that is easy for them to grasp and won’t scare the bejeezus out of them? If only they had some kind of “genius” method for quickly scanning not only what’s on our hard drives, but outside sources as well to bring up the news and information we’re interested in.

There’s not much question in my mind that Apple could do this. There’s also not much question in my mind that if they don’t, someone else will. So it becomes a matter of the method. Can Apple add this to iTunes without further breaking what it was originally meant to be? I don’t think a seperate app to accomplish this running alongside iTunes is a good idea as it just adds to the complexity of it and this is something that Apple avoids (thankfully) like the plague. Maybe it’s time to revisit what iTunes is and how it can be better utilized. MAYBE it’s time for something else. I couldn’t say what that something else might be, but you bet that someone at Apple is thinking about it.