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.
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.
