I didn’t have a good answer then, but after sitting up all night reading an actual printed novel, I think I do now.

When the iPod launched in 2001 there were already devices that did what it could do, more or less. There were big, clunky MP3 players with hard drives that held just as many songs, and there were tiny flash players that held 50 songs and fit in your pocket. The problem of taking your music with you was already handled, people said. You want lots of songs, get a Nomad. You want portable, get a flash player.

The iPod did both. You could have the thousands of songs, but you could also have them in your pocket. It took all the benefits of the tiny flash drives, and added the space of the hard drive.

Today, if you want to read a lot of — for want of a better term — “digital text” (like a long web page, a newspaper site, a PDF, an eBook etc) without sitting at a computer, at a desk, your choices are either laptop or smartphone. (If there’s an eReader that’s ready for prime time, especially for web browsing, I haven’t seen it yet).

Digital text is in exactly the same position digital music was in 2000. The laptop is one of the hard drive players. To use a laptop, you have to keep it largely vertical, which means you have to be largely vertical, too. Sit up straight while you’re reading the paper. Even the smallest netbooks take up much more space than a paperback, because the keyboard and screen are at right angles, and force you into clearing a large cube to use them. Think about the difference between squeezing a 15″ laptop on to a tray table on a plane or a train and just holding a magazine. The screen is large, clear and sharp, though.

The iPhone, on the other hand, is like those flash players. For reading digital text it’s already ahead: I’m doing more reading on Instapaper than anything else these days. It’s just too small, really. It’s for your pocket, not your lounge chair.

There is a space in the middle, here. As publishing moves online, you want to be able to curl up with digital text just like you’d curl up with a book: in a chair, tea in one hand, book in the other. You want to read on trains and planes, lying on your side in bed, in coffee shops, over breakfast. But the laptop’s too big and too much hassle for that, and the iPhone’s too small.

This is the problem the tablet solves. It’s digital text with the tactility of a magazine.

It’s obvious to us now that the iPod solved a huge problem. At the time, it wasn’t. After the launch, the critical consensus was summed up by Slashdot’s verdict: “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame”. Sometimes you don’t know you have a problem until it goes away.

Briefly, the idea is that the mess of traffic you get from Google is hard to make money from. If you live on advertising, you’re much better having a deep niche of people who visit time and again, with newcomers arriving thanks to links from people they trust (this means from Twitter and Facebook). So drop out of Google, build a select and committed audience, then make money from them.

There is a lot in this. If your site is clogged up with views from drive-by searchers, the rates you can charge drop sharply. You don’t know who your readers are, so instead of charging Vogue-esque prices for your select audience, you’re competing with the world and can barely command bargain-basement Ayrshire Leader rates.

However: cut off Google and while, yes, you lose the rubbish traffic, you also lose free promotion and what roughly equates to distribution. For a newspaper it’s like pulling out of newsagents and cancelling all your advertising; effectively, you’re going dark.

For that to make sense, you have to be sure that firstly you can get the readers in some other way, and secondly that you can make money from them. Murdoch can probably cross-promote enough to do the first part. He can’t do the second, for two reasons.

The first reason is the advertising revenue. The Cuban-Betteridge idea is based on advertising to niches, but in fact, News International titles are the exact opposite of niche: the money makers are mass-market papers like the Sun. It’s true that, as Betteridge points out, the papers are dealing in niches, but they’re not the narrow niches of a Gizmodo, they’re broad-brush dinosaurs. Online those carefully cultivated traditional niches are pretty much worthless.

A paper with a market niche can sell it in two ways: display advertising, and classified advertising. Classified advertising is the big money-maker offline, but online it’s dead: eBay, Rightmove and Monster have taken the market. All that’s left is display, and how attractive a proposition is a closed-garden Sun or Fox site going to present? These aren’t even ABC1s, and there won’t even be that many of them. Muck, and not enough of it.

Murdoch already knows this. He points out, rightly, that no blog or news site is making anything like serious money. There’s no advertising market there that can pay what he needs it to pay. This is why he’s still talking about charging, although he postponed it last week.

The impact on charging is the second reason opting out won’t work. Suppose the whole world is wrong and he can persuade people, after hundreds of years of ad subsidy, to pay for news not only what it costs to make but also his 20% profit margin. To have a hope of making that work, the prices need to be as low as possible. So he’s going to need a whole lot of readers paying up. Where will he get them? From the internet. Which means Google. Which he doesn’t want to be on.


This is why the idea is so incoherent. The only conceivable harm Google can do is to hurt your advertising rates. Murdoch isn’t really interested in advertising rates, he’s already written them off (and by extension, Mark Cuban’s plan). Murdoch is interested in attracting paying subscribers. But going off Google damages his sites’ ability to attract these mythical subscribers, and the only conceivable gain is protecting advertising revenue that is not now, and never will be, enough.

Ultimately, however, Murdoch is right: it’s no good for his business to be on Google. Not because of the traffic they send, but simply because it’s no good for his business to be on the internet at all. When he says he doesn’t want to be on Google, he actually means he doesn’t want to be on the internet, or have its economics apply to him.

The record companies tried that one already. So did AOL.

Got another email from new print journalism student. Is it even ethical to have a new intake? Might as well be a Philosophy degree

Adrian Monk, former head of journalism at City, a month ago:

[Potential journalism students] should be informed of the jobs crisis within journalism

Tim Luckhurst, former Scotsman editor, and head of journalism at Kent:

“[The majority of courses] at an undergraduate and post-graduate level are essentially worthless”

Both of them quoted in this piece from journalism.co.uk which says that, apart from Bournemouth and Kingston, no undergrad course has more than 40% of journalism grads working in media-associated professions within six months of graduation.

That’s worse than the latest figures for architects, which have just 49.5% working in the field six months after graduation. The Unistats (body run by UCAS and hotcourses) figures for the big four journalism courses do work out largely like it says:

Luckhurst talks about post-graduate courses as well, however. I can’t find the figures for Kent. Maybe his courses are worthless, but the others really aren’t:

So … undergrad journalism doesn’t really get you anywhere –– in fact, as a putatively vocational degree, it probably does more harm than an avowedly useless but challenging generic humanities degree. If you want a journalism job, do a postgrad, preferably at Strathclyde. Which is how it’s always been, really. Many of the best journalists I know came from the Strathclyde course, and it’d be both a disaster and surprising if they weren’t finding jobs.

Still, those are the 2008 figures, and the really swingeing cuts in newsrooms didn’t begin in earnest until the end of 2008. Next year’s figures are going to be worse — there’s hardly anywhere for those postgrad figures to go but down anyway.

More importantly, even if they do find jobs, though, the newsrooms they work in are going to be much poorer places to start careers from. There have been waves of layoffs, so instead of learning from experienced colleagues they’re going to get thrown in at the deep end. The people who would be able to help them are busy and few.

When I started subbing, received wisdom was it took two years to make a sub-editor you could let loose on something important. It might not be as long as that, but there’s no question that you do a tonne more learning after you start than before. It took years before I worked on a splash story. At my last paper, the dedicated sub for the front page had been in the job for a decade, and there wasn’t a sub quite like him; you couldn’t help but learn from his editing. Only rarely did anyone else get a look in. Then he took redundancy, and by 2009 we were so short on staff we gave splash stories to casuals and new starts who’d barely been subbing for six months.

The same month, a reporter came in on work experience, a 21-year-old who had just graduated from the same philosophy course I’d been on, and got six stories in the paper, including a page lead. On her first day.

So, yes, the figures aren’t quite as bad as journalism.co.uk makes out, but they don’t tell the whole story. Undergrad journalism really might as well be philosophy for all the vocational help it’s going to be, but you can still get a job if you do a post-graduate course. It’ll just be a job, though, not the start of a new career in print.

It’s already too late to get into the world of journalism, because if it hasn’t already vanished at your paper, it’s just about to.

UPDATE: I’d forgotten about this gem. “Come, fill the voids left at The Herald and Evening Times after we culled everyone, and get ‘gold standard’ training in how to put out a paper with no staff.” Not to say there’s no gold there, but it’s not the people with time to go and give lectures.

Your blog advocates a technical/legislative/market-based/crowd-sourced approach to saving journalism. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws owing to the avaraciousness of modern publishers.)

( ) It does not provide an income stream to the working journalist
( ) Nobody will spend eight hours sitting in a dull council meeting to do it
( ) It is defenseless against copy-and-paste
( ) ...

The full thing looks crappy on this template, so read it in full here

“Peeling the onion, peeling the onion” he intones. “That’s what’s being lost. The vital stuff of placing things on the record, of challenging the official account. These monsters who have taken over papers in America today have lost sight of it. We have to keep doing it. Not in a partisan way – just let’s find out what the bloody facts are!” – Harold Evans

(It’s badged as an interview by Alan Rusbridger, but reads more like he swept in and owned the place.)

The “duplicates functionality” part really means “duplicates our business model”, not “duplicates something the iPhone does”. Which stinks.

It’s possible they were forced into this by AT&T — who knows how tight the contracts are? — and were aware of how much damage they’d be doing, but were stuck between a rock and a hard place. But it’s also possible that it is capriciousness borne from hubris.

If that’s the latter, they’re badly wrong. Developers aren’t going to invest in making apps if there’s no hope of getting them onto the store, and the kind of apps that are badly lacking are the ones that are expensive. The 99¢ market isn’t entirely Apple’s fault (more on that later), but moves like this encourage it.

I suspect the huge sales volume is blinding them to what is being sold. The reason the App Store is great for Apple is not that it makes money (though that doesn’t hurt), it’s that when you’ve got an iPhone full of apps you aren’t going to switch to a Nokia when your contract expires. The apps are lock-in, the same sort of lock-in that keeps everyone on Windows.

But 99¢ ringtone apps aren’t lock-in, they’re diversions. The lock-in apps are the expensive ones, made by big developers. Who are all running far away from this mess.

It’s foolish and unnecessary — the fact that iTunes is wide open to total competition on both Mac OS X and Windows hasn’t hurt it at all

Except that iTunes isn’t open to total competition, not even slightly. The jukebox is, sure, but not the stack — from store to music in your pocket. Amazon can make an MP3 store; a desktop jukebox could even tie into it. To compete with the whole thing, though, they need to be on the iPod. Or have a device that beats its 70%+ marketshare. Nobody right now is in a position to compete with all three. The battle would be a lot easier, though, if they could write custom software for the iPod. Which is why Apple’s cagy about it.

But Mail? Why on earth should Apple care if some third-party email client for the iPhone becomes wildly popular? It makes no sense

I’m not so sure. To be fair: MailWrangler getting junked surprised me a lot, even though it looks like a crappy app. Apple’s reason was the possibility of confusion, which doesn’t make much sense. Until you think about all the other apps that integrate with mail — since there’s no copy and paste on the phone, if you want to send data about you’d better hope it has a “send with mail” button. Which will always go to Mail.app.

Potential for confusion there, when Mail.app opens instead of MailWrangler? Possibly, I guess. It would sure make the phone’s integration seem junky.

I have a theory. It is more, well, emotional than logical. But it’s the only theory I can think of that makes any sense at all and fits the available evidence.

Except it does none of these things. Probably because Gruber’s looking for an over-arching theory on this (everybody who cares is too, frankly), but I don’t think there is one to be had. Apple is rejecting apps on a case-by-case basis: Podcaster for threatening the crown, MailWranger for being confusing. There is little similar between the two.

In fact his whole “it’s just the four dock apps” thing barely holds up. There are other apps that run in the background — Calendar, SMS, Maps, Clock and possibly Remote — which blows “background processing is the one factor that unites the four dock apps” out of the water.

Regardless, these are niggles with his asides, not his argument. He is right that developers will be uncertain and unwilling until the rules are clear and are stuck to. I know why Apple doesn’t want them that way, as it’s an invitation for lawyers (legal or otherwise) to start manning the barricades on behalf of RealPlayer Mobile Extreme or something, but that’s a bridge they can cross later.

This problem is a bridge they need to cross now. Because the novelty of to-do lists and RSS readers is wearing thin.

In the rejection note for Podcaster, the reason given was:

Since Podcaster assists in the distribution of podcasts, it duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes.

The assumption is that this means the iTunes application, but this doesn’t add up when there are so many other apps already that “duplicate functionality”. There are calculators, notes apps, stocks apps, weather apps. Pandora does streaming radio, just like iTunes.

I think they’re talking about the iTunes store. That’s what you don’t get to compete with. Hence the reference to duplicating a “section” in the rejection note. Since when did apps have sections? The store does, though, lots of them. The iTunes Store is a big strategic deal for Apple. Would they allow Amazon to make an Amazon Music Store app? Not likely. Anything that looks like a store has to be verboten.

In fact, this makes the vetting process way more plausible. “No bandwidth hogs” always seemed a little bit lame. Apple wouldn’t care, right? “No threats to iTunes Store”? Ding. You want to make a portable music store, you’re not doing it on the iPhone and especially not on the iPod. You’ll need to build the web service, the desktop app, the phone, the phone OS and then the phone app.

This leaves the other horn of Gruber’s dilemma:

If this is truly Apple’s policy, it’s a disaster for the platform. And if it’s not Apple’s policy, then Podcaster’s exclusion is proof that the approval process is completely broken.

… and, yes, the approval process appears completely broken. The reasons given so far tell volumes about the low level of the people doing the vetting, and that speaks of the charade the process really is. (Which should have been obvious. The store is full of shite.)

Some of the calls for an Evangelist are right. Even a halfway decent explanation of what isn’t acceptable would help. But, it’s doesn’t seem like Apple employees are hiding this criteria from developers maliciously; it feels like they don’t know.

They don’t know because, again, this isn’t really about any of the half-assed reasons they’ve got for only allowing apps to install via the App Store. It is about maintaining Apple’s control so that they can stop people barging into the middle of their Greater Unified Jukebox. That’s why the whole thing is such a shambles: they’re winging it, app by app, trying to make up a coherent strategy as they go. With apparently little more to go on than “we are keeping control of what gets on the iPod. You make up some reasons why.”

It’s genius, really.

Psychology no doubt makes us better men and women, more sympathetic and tolerant, but it doesn’t make writing any easier. Had Shakespeare been confronted with psychology, “To be or not to be” might have come out, “To continue as a social unit or not to do so. That is the personality problem. Whether ’tis a better sign of integration at the conscious level to display a psychic tolerance toward the maladjustments and repressions induced by one’s lack of orientation in one’s environment or — ” But Hamlet would never have finished the soliloquy.

(via the goddamn great Big Contrarian)