The routinely strong Seeking Alpha site features a somewhat conciliatory post from media corporate financial advisor on the impending coexistence of the Apple iPad and the newspaper industry.

Dan Ramsden has some tough words for Google. He sees its recent encouragement of the newspaper industry to experiment as self-serving --- the more papers try to do things online, the more Google's search engine technology benefits.

But he makes an interesting choice in where to place the technological bet. While recent media coverage has suggested Google's open-source design of its Android smartphone offers the greatest opportunity for old media to succeed, Ramsden begs to differ.

He is firmly in the Apple camp. It's the technology of choice by consumers, it's the technology company that has figured out (through iTunes and the iPhone) how to exact a premium for content, so it's the technology the newspaper business should focus on serving.

"Newspaper and magazine owners, who are struggling to redefine their business models for a new online and mobile environment, would probably be well served to align themselves with the platform that can offer a revenue model, and a mobile marketplace, and leave the experimentation and iteration stuff to young entrepreneurs and startups that do not yet have a franchise to protect," he writes.

He suggests: "Style, design, quality control, are all characteristics that will do much more to facilitate the popularity of paid content than one more colorful website that may or may not show up at the top of Google’s search results."

Brian Chen explores the technical and ethical issues ahead for journalism as Apple's iPad comes to market. Principally he looks at the gatekeeper role Apple is playing on applications and their content.

He also cites others who worry that Apple will not work to protect press freedoms and will bow to complaints about content.

Given the speed with which applications are emerging, Apple also faces a problem in keeping pace. Chen suggests the iPad and the App Store are not the ideal environment for newspapers and magazines to be reborn.

In his Mediactive blog, Dan Gillmor argues that news organizations shouldn't depend on the iPad or Apple to ride to the rescue. Its devices may offer interesting opportunities, but its corporate culture is something to fear, he suggests.

"Ultimately, I believe, the most important issue is whether news organizations should get in bed with a company that makes unilateral and non-transparent decisions like the ones Apple has been making about content in all kinds of ways," writes Gillmor, who is working on a book project online.

As evidence, Gillmor cites Apple's effort to take controversial adult-oriented material off iTunes and its aversion to Flash --- matters he suggests are part of a wider autocratic culture not open to free expression. He believes Apple CEO Steve Jobs isn't a free-press supporter.

Newspapers, he says, are "putting far too much trust in a company that doesn’t deserve it."

Martin Langeveld, the industry veteran and contributor to the Nieman Journalism Lab site, has an extensive post on how publishers can best embrace the imminent iPad from Apple.

He argues that mobile technology is going to be ubiquitous and that publishers ought to array their resources around several approaches.

Apart from some obvious directives --- array resources, create content and embrace the iPad --- Langeveld suggests publishers work with Apple to enable advertising personalization. 

He also believes new relationships with marketers need to be created to facilitate transactions.

To date the conventional wisdom has been that Apple's impending iPad tablet could revive the audience for print-driven journalism. The assumption: A bigger audience will naturally yield better economic metrics.

But the general manager of the not-for-profit investigative journalism foundation, ProPublica, begs to differ. Richard Tofel argues that the iPad could kill the newspaper because digital revenue will not suffice in propelling journalism.

Even if circulation and subscription revenue can be supplanted by the iPad's arrival, digital advertising is lagging seriously behind print advertising and may never catch up. If this is so, the iPad could hasten a newspaper's decline.

For the iPad to be the newspaper's saving platform, digital advertising would need to be three to five times more costly --- a rate that seems utterly impossible to contemplate, Tofel argues.

In recent months it is increasingly clear that the major cost challenge ahead for newspapers isn't the creation of journalism but the manufacturing and distribution of the journalism.

So, why not use the latest technology to bypass the printing press and the delivery infrastructure, borrow a page from the phone companies and hitch an iPad to a newspaper subscription?

The Joe Zeff Design blog suggests this and it is not alone in conceptualizing a multi-year subscription coupled with a cost-defrayed iPad. The notion is that this would be win-win.

The challenge is twofold: First, not everyone wants or can use a substitute for ink on paper, and second, it's unclear what a newspaper could do once the subscription term ran its course. Would it have to continually refresh technology --- as the phone companies do --- to keep the customer?

Your thoughts?

The day-later fallout from Apple's announcement of the iPad in the newspaper industry is one of caution. While there is little question the imminent arrival of the device can help deliver newspaper-driven content, it isn't any kind of panacea.

The chief economist of Google weighed in quickly Thursday with a sobering view. Hal Varian believes the iPad will help, but that full-on reinvention will be needed to make the newspaper's economics viable.

Varian believes the iPad will help newspapers reach people during the day, but he's not a proponent of paywalls between them and content.

"The challenge is, how can we make newspaper reading a leisure-time activity again? We know reading the news is valuable to our customers, but they don't spend much time doing it." .

Today's significant announcement by Apple of the iPad is already being pronounced as a larger iPhone, a smaller MacBook and a rangier iPod.

The 9.7-inch screen weighs 1.5 pounds and is a half-inch thick. Its supposed battery power is 10 hours, with one month on standby, and it can play HD. It has Wi-Fi, comes in a 3G version, and has a U.S. deal with AT & T on data storage. International Wi-Fi versions will be ready in 60 days.

The price tag is lower than expected: $499. 

It seems particularly suited to video, but The New York Times has unveiled its partnership this morning with it to emulate the newspaper reading experience.

There's a major league baseball video application on the way. And it has introduced iBooks as an e-reading technology. It has developed iWork for it and has access to the educational market.

Alan Mutter on Reflections of a Newsosaur has some instant prescription for the industry on how to work with the device.

Engadget kept a very strong running comme

The Wall Street Journal reports today that Apple's aim with its new tablet due next week is to reshape the news business in the way the iPod reshaped the music business.

It will be family-friendly, conceived as a device passed around the household for media consumption, and easily shared.

What isn't clear is how publishers will participate. Apple has indicated it has been in discussions with publishers on content strategies, but there is no indication yet on pricing structures for what people consume.

Apple has indicated it has an announcement January 27 and all speculation focuses on the introduction of its tablet-like device that most believe will be called iSlate.

The Guardian's Mercedes Bunz suggests in a post today that one thing Apple could do, if it were trying to support journalism, would be to unveil a micropayment plan along the lines of iTunes for news.

Her post is more hopeful than empirically grounded. There is little indication Apple will do more than have some publishing partners for its device, and the one notable likely partner (The New York Times) is already neck-deep with other devices like the Kindle.

But Bunz notes that Apple could help journalism address its micropayment conundrum by bringing the notion forward as it brings its device to market.