When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad last month, there were immediate debates over what kind of impact it would have on both the news habits of consumers and the bottom lines of news organizations. But one thing seemed obvious: that the iPad would be a glorious playground for user-interface designers, information architects, and others who think about how information should be found, structured, consumed, and designed. That 9.7-inch screen, combined with the iPhone’s multitouch interface, will inspire some innovative new ways to present news. At the unveiling, the only taste we got of these new ideas was The New York Times’ iPad app (above), which brought a bit of the typography and layout DNA of the print newspaper onto the device.

To think about these issues, I got in touch with John-Henry Barac. He spent a decade at The Guardian on the print side, as an art director and designer, then moved to the digital world. As a consultant, he designed The Guardian’s first iPhone app, which stands out as one of the more interesting within the iPhone news app world, much of which bears a certain bland sameness. (I particularly liked the small tag icon that allows the curious to quickly match other stories to the keywords of the current one.) John-Henry’s now an independent design consultant, anxious to get his hands on an iPad and to explore the new medium.

Here’s an edited version of our conversation. Among the topics we discuss:

— Will a more print-like screen push designers to build more print-like interfaces?
— How can surprise and serendipity be brought back into the reading experience?
— Will the iPad make reading longer pieces more interesting — or tolerable?

Joshua Benton: When you first saw the iPad and that screen, what were the thoughts running through your mind as a designer of news apps?

John-Henry Barac: Well, the first thing is obviously space — actually having physically a lot more space to play with. The iPhone format demanded that you strip away and keep simplifying, whereas the iPad offers the opportunity to bring back more into the page, and allow the reader to scan, select, and read an article all on the same screen. There are a few lessons to draw from the iPhone experience, in terms of keeping it simple and focused.

You mentioned [before the interview] the tag icon — when we were doing that, my specifications to the developers were that the button should be physically bigger than the tag is, so that the actual space for the finger to touch is a invisible button is a lot larger than the tag. So it’s kind of about giving visual cues, but also helping the user to use those objects and not to mis-hit and all the rest of it.

But I think the point about the tag icon was to give the ability to physically dig deeper into a story, and I think that’s what I find very exciting about the touch interface and about the iPad. You’ll be able to do that, but with physical targets which are easy to hit and which will let you delve deeper into the story.

In designing newspapers, you’re always thinking about how to offer the reader different ways into a story — so there’s the headline, there’s the standfirst and the rest of it, but there’s also other call-outs and boxes and other objects which allow the user multiple ways to access the story. And if those are used carefully and coherently, they help to build greater depth of the story that you’re trying to tell. I think the iPad begins to offer that level of complexity. It offers the reader many different ways to kind of grab hold of part of the story that might interest them, whether it’s a small snippet with a link or another way to dig into a longer article.

Josh: One thing that immediately struck me is that, when you look at the iPhone and the small screen, as a news designer it’s immediately apparent that you’re going to be dealing with a different visual grammar, a different visual language then you would be with a print newspaper. I wonder if with the iPad, which looks a lot more like a sheet of paper and like something with a print analog, whether we’re going to see the visual cues and visual language of print just be carried over to the new device. Or will it be an opportunity to build new kinds of cues, in the same way that the iPhone forced you to build new ways to design news?

John-Henry: One would want to think of new ways of doing things, absolutely. One thing that springs to mind is the ability to access news in a hierarchal way: to have a column of stories on the left, for instance, very much like Apple’s native apps. In Mail you have your list of messages, and you tap on a message and read it in the wider column. And I think that’s kind of the first obvious thing to do.

But also, for instance, the ability to be able to have a story and a related Twitter feed which is constantly updating, both of them right there with you on the page. Or the ability to have links which open up dialog boxes which enable you to access more content, which you can then put away again and continue reading the article. I think what there are many cues which you can borrow from the newspaper but then rethink in this medium.

But I think the other big difference is touch. Someone asked me the other day, “Why would you want to build an iPad app when you could just use your website?” And I think what touch gives you is such a different way of accessing information as a user. It’s physically direct. You’re much more focused — you can literally touch a fact and get more information about it. So I think therefore you do want to actually work on something new. You don’t want to just think it’s a big space which you’re gonna access the browser — you want to really think about touch, the way the user manipulates the information, the ways which you might be able to take a photograph, look at it more closely, enlarge it, put it away again, continue reading the story. I think that touch is the very exciting thing here. I think there’s room for exploring a more traditional model on the iPad as well, but I think you don’t want it to feel just like a great big PDF that you’re dragging around.

Josh: What was your reaction to The New York Times’ app as it was shown off during the iPad announcement? It’s the only example we have so far of a vision of how to develop a news application for this device. It seems to take a lot of cues from print in terms of carrying over the typography from print, carrying over the column styles, and carrying over the layout of the stories on a page.

John-Henry: It’s very much looking at the familiarity of the print model — the impression is that you’re scanning through the paper. The typography was glorious, firstly. And the ability to look at videos or galleries within your articles was immediately an enormous plus. I wouldn’t want to comment too much about it, since it was a couple weeks’ work and there’s a lot of work to be done on what their iPad app finally looks like. It seemed it could be quite easy to get lost — to not figure out where it was you came from, or else to have to kind of drag your way back. We need more thought on indexing, seeing what your journey is through the paper.

My starting point might be a little different, and the kind of early imagining that I’ve had has been more to do with different speeds of data — different speeds of content, longer and shorter reads, involving Twitter, being able to use dialog boxes to give you more information you can check out and then put away. But I think it’s very exciting to see people trying out a model closer to a newspaper.

Josh: One of the things print fans talk about is the discoverability and the serendipity of flipping through pages — coming across the story you may not have realized you’re interested in. One of the big problems with iPhone news apps is that they pretty much all have a straight list of stories to scroll through, and that’s it. You can do things around most-emailed lists and such, but it’s a very hierarchical, non-surprising presentation. It seems like the iPad might be a platform that allows more ways to present possible reading opportunities to readers.

John-Henry: Absolutely. With the Guardian iPhone app, one of the comments I saw was from users or readers saying they were able to rediscover serendipity, with the tag icon and the ability to follow a keyword or a subject. Rather than just read an article, you might follow the subject of, I don’t know, “iPad” or “Apple,” and find out what the stories are around that subject. And you might follow another keyword and end up in a different part of Technology, or in an education story, or whatever. Accessing related data, following links within stories, or dipping from an article into a gallery, then from that a photograph in that gallery into another related article — all of those things give you more ways to browse and to just discover things. I’m sure there are many, many, many other ways to bring back serendipity — but one has to get one’s hands on these devices first and try it out, really.

I think that one thing one hopes for with touch is that people will be inquisitive with the device. It really does invite you to tap around and find out what’s there. But on the other hand, I have had to tell one friend of mine, who is a veteran of digital devices — I’ve had to show him the tag icon and that he could tap on it. I’ve had to show him that you could double tap on a gallery and get a browser in your front page and not leave the front page to do it. So sometimes people aren’t quite as inquisitive as one would hope.

Josh: That brings up the matter of the familiarity of a user interface. An iPhone user who has downloaded several news apps has probably gotten used to how they all work and how similar they all are to one another. Maybe a new platform will make people be a little more adventurous and try out new kinds of interactions, because it’ll be unfamiliar.

John-Henry: Absolutely. To be honest, we’ve only seen Apple’s first presentation of the iPad. I’m sure there’s more in terms of UI that’s available that we haven’t yet seen, and there’s a lot more which can be created. There’s a lot of off-the-shelf UI which Apple offers, which is fantastic to use, and looking a little bit at the software developer kit, I can see that they are making more use of popup windows, much like we did in the Guardian app. But I’m sure that there are a lot more creative ways to use animation, to use different UI elements. If you scroll downwards, what happens? If you scroll to the left, what happens? There are so many different ways of handling the space. I’m very interested in the ability to offer readers a journey where there are surprises along the way — to get to that kind of model where you can have a templated experience which builds in interesting surprises for the reader. The ability to dig around and explore. But, you know, one has to get one’s hands on the software development kit and find out what can actually be done.

Josh: Last question. One of the concerns of a lot of journalists is that the move to digital media, they argue, has reduced people’s willingness to read long stories. This form factor is a lot closer to the one electronic device that is associated with long-form reading, the Kindle. Do you think that the form factor may encourage more people to read longer?

John-Henry: I would hope so. I would have thought so. I think there’s the other side as well, which is that as someone who’s designed special sections for the Guardian for years, that I hope it will bring a bit more craft back into the digital arena. Things like editorial illustration, careful use of photography, those sorts of things — I would hope there’d be opportunities to bring a bit more of that in. And that is very much associated with features and longer reads. There will also be different ways of approaching longer text — scrolling through or flicking over pages. With the high-resolution screen, the opportunity to do more interesting things with type. I think all of those things and the form factor offer up the opportunity to get longer reads back in.

Josh: Because for digital devices, the job of a news designer tends to be designing the templates into which an endless number of stories are going to flow. So maybe there’s an opportunity to have more individual designing of stories at the story level.

John-Henry: I would hope so. But I think that with that, there also comes the need for new models of newspaper structure. Maybe in the future there’ll be new tools. There’s no such thing as a kind of InDesign for digital in the same way. So I think there’s a lot of things that will be shaken up by the iPad and absolutely, you know, there’s a lot that newspapers are hoping for. They’re having a difficult time at the moment, but there are huge opportunities. Good newspaper apps require good design from the outset, then we need to find ways to craft stories too. iPad itself doesn’t provide the answers, the issues for designers and for newspapers as a whole require a lot of creative thinking about structure as well as investment in new areas. Touch interface and mobile devices like this provide great opportunities but there’s a lot to be done to make them work out.

So, it’s official: There is an Apple tablet, and it’s called the iPad. And, at least to these Apple-friendly eyes, it looks really, really nice. I can feel my credit card getting warm already.

But for future-of-journalism junkies, the question was never whether or not Apple could come up with a sexy new device. The question was whether it could have an impact on the news business. Phrases like “save the news business” and “alter the economics and consumer attitudes of the digital era” have been tossed around an awful lot in the last few months.

So what did we learn today about how the iPad will impact journalism? Here are my first thoughts:

— It will have a real impact on consumer behavior. This thing’s going to be popular — I suspect it’ll sell at multiples of the Kindle (assuming Amazon ever decides to tell us how many Kindles they sell). And the form factor will be attractive in a lot of contexts, and that’ll likely increase the amount of news and information that people consume. Anyone who loved the Kindle will love this (unless they’re e-Ink junkies), and the iPad will also appeal to big crowds who would have never thought of a Kindle — gamers, mobile workers, YouTube addicts, and more.

— I don’t think the iPad changes the paid-content equation. The dream of the news business is that a device will come along that will convince people to pay for digital news. That was the dream of the Kindle — people will pay $10 a month to “subscribe” to all the news we give away for free on the web! And while that dream has dimmed on the Kindle, the same ideas kept popping up on the road to the iPad. As Brad Stone and Stephanie Clifford wrote in the Times:

People who have seen the tablet say Apple will market it not just as a way to read news, books and other material, but also a way for companies to charge for all that content. By marrying its famously slick software and slender designs with the iTunes payment system, Apple could help create a way for media companies to alter the economics and consumer attitudes of the digital era.

Or as a Wired headline writer put it: “Apple Event to Focus on Reinventing Content, Not Tablets.”

But the iPad, as we know it today, doesn’t change any of the fundamental economics of news commerce. On the iPhone, you can sell news apps through the App Store; you can upsell specific pieces of content to people within your apps; and you can sell advertising within those applications. (Apple takes chunks of the revenue from those first two options.)

On the iPad, you can…do those same three things. The only thing that has changed is the size, and that big beautiful screen. Will people who weren’t willing to buy news on an iPhone be sold on the idea just because the text is bigger and the photos are prettier? I’d be surprised. The commerce proposition hasn’t changed.

It was telling that the first website Steve Jobs used to show off the iPad’s web browser was The New York Times. (Apple and the Times have a longstanding mutual appreciation.) Showing nytimes.com before showing off the Times’ iPad app illustrated the big problem device-as-savior advocates face: As long as a device is a great web browsing machine, and websites remain free, it’ll be difficult to push people into the walled garden of an application. Not impossible — difficult. And If you’re willing to put up a paywall on your website, then you have issues to consider much larger than the iPad.

I didn’t see anything today that made me change my opinion that device-based dreams of a news deus ex machina are wishful thinking, and that the difficult revenue decisions will have to be made pan-platform.

— The iPhone app ecosystem isn’t changing radically. There are a lot of news organizations that have invested in building nice iPhone apps. That investment will also have value on the iPad, because native iPhone apps should work fine on the iPad — particularly relatively simple ones like news apps. And revising apps to be sized to the iPad’s screen likely won’t be difficult, given how previous changes to the SDK have gone.

One thing that the iPad does do is give user-interface designers many more pixels to deal with, and among newspapers’ core skills remains the ability to display organized text and information in a pleasing and useful way. On the iPhone, the limited real estate meant you were stuck with a rigid world of user-interface possibilities, which is why nearly every newspaper iPhone app looks roughly interchangeable with another. But as the New York Times iPad app showed, with its Times Reader-esque interface, there’ll be a lot more room for experimentation, and that should be fruitful.

— One big winner: advertising. Mobile advertising has been deemed the next big thing for a long time now, and while it’s seen plenty of growth, it’s been living a confined existence. Ads in iPhone apps have mostly been locked into small banner ads secured to the bottom of articles and lists of articles. And the web has shown that banner ads stuck in the same place over time are extraordinarily easy for consumers to ignore. Nobody makes much money in that scenario.

But the iPad’s screen opens up a world of new possibilities — from sensible text ads to site takeovers (app takeovers?) to interstitials to more. Will consumers love all of those? No, probably not. (I won’t.) But they sell for a good deal more than banner ads, and that could generate additional revenue for news organizations.

— Surprisingly little on magazines. A lot of the talk in tablet land focused on magazines — several mag companies have been working on their own tablet concepts, and the design flexibility of the magazine page seems like a natural match for a bigger-than-a-phone screen and form factor. The magazine subscription model even seems like a natural match for something like the Season Pass you can buy for TV shows in iTunes. But magazines weren’t mentioned at all. Several magazines have moved in the one-iPhone-app-per-issue direction, and those apps will be much more impressive on the big screen, but magazines are in the same boat as newspapers: waiting for the iPad ecommerce revolution to arrive.

It’s important to remember we’re seeing the first iteration of the iPad, which won’t even ship for two months. It took a year for the iPhone to get its App Store; when the phone debuted in 2007, everyone thought it was awfully nice, but it wasn’t sending news organization scurrying to hire Cocoa Touch developers. It took two years for the iPod to get its iTunes Store; the iPod’s impact on the music business only took off when the store arrived in 2003. So there could easily be an announcement in six months or a year that makes the iPad’s impact real.

But until then, the iPad looks like a great product that will please consumers more than it’ll change the game for news organizations.

The change appears to have gone in effect around Jan. 15, when a few Kindle publishers spotted changes in Amazon’s Digital Text Platform. A new option gave publishers the choice to “not enable digital rights management.” A science-fiction author named Joseph Rhea appears to have been the first to notice the change. On Jan. 15, Amazon announced an expansion of its Digital Text Platform to non-U.S. authors, but made no mention of DRM changes.

Amazon’s brief explanation of the new feature inside the DTP:

You may choose, on a per title basis, to have us apply DRM (Digital Rights Management) technology which is intended to inhibit unauthorized access to or copying of digital content files for titles. Once your title is published, this setting cannot be changed.

The Digital Text Platform is aimed at small publishers and authors; it’s gained a foothold in short fiction, but it’s a platform with potential for both independent journalists and small news organizations. It’s unclear whether similar changes are afoot for newspapers, magazines, or large publishers, who use a different system to publish to the Kindle. I’ve asked Amazon for explanation of what exactly this new choice entails and haven’t heard back. I’ll update this post if I do. [See update below.]

Many book publishers (with a few notable exceptions) have been hesitant to offer their works digitally without DRM, fearing a “napsterization” of their industry — a free supply of all books available for download via file-sharing networks.

But eliminating DRM could also increase customers’ comfort level with buying ebooks. Right now, someone who buys lots of Kindle ebooks is out of luck if, six months from now, some better non-Kindle ereader comes along. The books can’t be moved over. Without DRM — and with the knowledge that their ebook investment can have long-term returns — readers might be willing to shift their buying to digital. That may or may not be good news for publishers — their margins are higher for hardcover books than for ebooks — but it would be good news for Amazon, the dominant ebook vendor and one that has shown willingness to expand the Kindle platform beyond the Kindle device.

It’s hard to ignore that Amazon is making these changes shortly before Apple is expected to unveil its long-anticipated tablet computer on Jan. 27, which could be the most potent challenge to the Kindle ebook ecosystem yet. Amazon also announced yesterday it would radically improve the revenue share it offers Kindle publishers, handing over 70 percent of the list price — a level that matches what Apple offers software publishers in its App Store.

We won’t find out until next week what DRM restrictions the notional Apple tablet would offer. Last year, Apple removed DRM from the music it sells via iTunes, but it remains on iTunes’ movies and TV shows.

While most big publishers seem unlikely to step away from DRM anytime soon, some of the independent authors who have used Amazon’s DTP to self-publish were more excited about the move. As research scientist/”hobby” writer Joseph Rhea put it:

I can only speak for myself, but I know I would be happy with someone buying my book and sharing it on 2 Kindles, or a Kindle and a PC (with the Kindle reader), or your iPhone. It’s yours, so why shouldn’t you be able to read it anywhere you want? I am also not that worried about people “stealing” it and making thousands of copies that are spread all over the web — I should be so popular!

UPDATE, 5:18 p.m.: Amazon just got in touch to say the change is not about allowing DTP users to publish without DRM — it’s about making it easier for publishers to choose DRM or no DRM. The choice has always existed for DTP publishers, a spokesman said, and the default state was no DRM. (That’s different from the situation with larger publishing houses, where anti-DRM publishers have complained about the difficulty of removing “Kindle’s ‘compulsory DRM.’”) I updated the headline and lead to reflect that.

Newspaper ad revenue: At least technically, the recession is over, with GDP growth measured at 2.2 percent in Q3 of 2009 and widely forecast in Q4 to exceed that rate. But newspaper revenue has not followed suit, dropping 28 percent in Q3. McClatchy and the New York Times Company (which both came in at about that level in Q3) hinted recently that Q4 would be better, in the negative low-to-mid 20 percent range. This is not unexpected — in the last few recessions with actual GDP contraction (1990-91 and 2001), newspaper revenue remained in negative territory for at least two quarters after the GDP returned to growth. But the newspaper dip has been bigger each time, and the current slide started (without precedent) a year and a half before the recession did, with a cumulative revenue loss of nearly 50 percent. Newspaper revenue has never grown by much more than 10 percent (year over year) in any one quarter, so no real recovery is likely; this is a permanently downsized industry. My call for revenue by quarter during 2010 is: -11%, -10%, -6%, -2%.

Newspaper online revenue (included in the overall prediction above) will be the only bright spot, breaking even in Q1 and ramping up to 15% growth by Q4.

Newspaper circulation revenue will grow, because publishers are realizing that print is now a niche they can and should charge for, rather than trying to keep marginal subscribers with non-stop discounting. But this means circulation will continue to drop. In 2009, we saw drops of 7.1 percent in the six-month period ending March 31 and 10.6 percent for the period ending Sept. 30. In 2010, we’ll see a losses of at least 7.5% in each period.

Newspaper bankruptcies: I don’t think we’re out of the woods, or off the courthouse steps, although the newspaper bankruptcy flurry in 2009 was in the first half of the year. The trouble is the above-mentioned revenue decline. If it continues at double-digit rates, several companies will hit the wall, where they have no capital or credit resources left and where a “restructuring” is preferable and probably more strategic than continuing to slash expenses to match revenue losses. So I will predict at least one bankruptcy of a major newspaper company. In fact, let’s make that at least two.

Newspaper closings and publishing-frequency reductions: Yup, there will be closing and frequency reductions. Those revenue and circulation declines will hit harder in some places than others, forcing more extinction than we saw in 2009.

Mergers: It’s interesting that we saw very little M&A activity in 2009 — none of the players saw much opportunity to gain by consolidation. They all just hunkered down waiting for the recession to end. It has ended, but if my prediction is right and revenue doesn’t turn up or at least flatten by Q2, the urge to merge or otherwise restructure will set in. Expect to see at least a few fairly big newspaper firms merge or be acquired by other media outfits. (But, as in 2009, don’t expect Google to buy the New York Times or any other print media.)

Shakeups: Given the fact that newspaper stocks generally outperformed the market, it’s not surprising that there were few changes in the executive suites. But if the industry continues to contract, those stock prices will head back down. Don’t be surprised to see some boards turn to new talent. If they do, they’ll bring in specialists from outside the industry good at creative downsizing and reinvention of business models. Sooner would be better than later, in some cases.

Hyperlocal: There will be more and more launches of online and online/print combos focused on covering towns, neighborhoods, cities and regions, with both for-profit and nonprofit business models. Startups and major media firms looking to enter this space with standardized and mechanized approaches won’t do nearly as well as one-off ventures where real people take a risk, start a site, cover their market like a blanket, create a brand and sell themselves to local advertisers.

Paid content: At the end of 2008, this wasn’t yet much of a discussion topic. It became the obsession of 2009, but the year is ending with few actual moves toward full paywalls or more nuanced models. Steve Brill’s Journalism Online promises a beta rollout soon and claims a client list numbering well over 1,000 publications. Those are not commitments to use JO’s system — rather, they’re signatories to a non-binding letter of intent that gives them access to some of the findings from JO’s beta test. Many publishers, including many who have signed that letter, remain firmly on the sidelines, realizing that they have little content that’s unique or valuable enough to readers to charge for. JO itself has not speculated what kind of content might garner reader revenue, although its founders have been clear that they’re not recommending across-the-board paywalls.

So where are we heading in 2010? My predictions are that by the end of the year, most daily papers will still be publishing the vast majority of their content free on the web; that most of those experimenting with pay systems will be disappointed; and that the few broad paywalls in place now at local and regional dailies will prove of no value in stemming print circulation declines.

Gadgets: The recently announced consortium led by Time Inc. to publish magazine and (eventually) newspaper content on tablets and other platforms will see the first fruits of its efforts late in the year as Apple and several others unveil tablet devices — essentially oversized iPhones that don’t make phone calls but have 10-inch screens and make great color readers. Expect pricing in the $500 ballpark plus a data plan, which could include a selection of magazine subscriptions (sort of like channels in cable packages, but with more à la carte choice). If newspapers are on the ball, they can join Time’s consortium and be part of the plan. Tablet sales will put a pretty good dent in Kindle sales. One wish/hope for the (as yet unnamed) publisher consortium: Atomize the content and let me pick individual articles — don’t force me to subscribe to a magazine or buy a whole copy. In other words, don’t attempt to replicate the print model on a tablet.

Social networks: Twitter’s own site usage will continue to be flat (it has actually lost traffic slowly but steadily since summer), but that probably means more people are accessing Twitter through various apps on computers and smartphones, so actual engagement is hard to gauge.  Facebook will continue to grow internationally but is probably close to maxing out in the U.S. With Facebook now cash-flow positive, and Twitter still essentially revenue-less except for lucrative search deals with Google and Bing, could Mark Zuckerberg and Evan Williams be holding deal talks sometime during the year? It wouldn’t surprise me.

Privacy: The Federal Trade Commission will recommend to Congress a new set of online privacy initiatives requiring clearer “opt-in” provisions governing how personal information of web users may be used for things like targeting ads and content. Anticipating this, Facebook, Google and others will continue to maneuver to lock consumers into opt-in settings that allow broad use of personal data without having to ask consumers to reset their preferences in response to the legislation. In the end, Congress will dither but not pass a major overhaul of privacy regs.

Mobile (with thanks to Art Howe of Verve Wireless): By the end of 2010 a huge shift toward mobile consumption of news will be evident. In 2009, mobile news was just getting on the radar screen, but during the year several million people downloaded the AP’s mobile app to their iPhones, and several million more adopted apps from individual publishers. By the end of 2010, with many more smartphone users, news apps will find tens of millions of new users (Art might project 100 million), and that’s with tablets just appearing on the playing field. During 2009, web readership of news (though not of newspaper content) overtook news in printed newspapers. Looking out to sometime in 2011 or 2012, more people will get their news from a mobile device than from a desktop or laptop, and news in print will be left completely in the dust.

Stocks: I accurately predicted the Dow’s rise during 2009 and that newspaper stocks would beat the market. The Dow will rise by 8% (from its Dec. 31 close), but newspaper stocks will sink as revenue fails to rebound quarter after quarter.

PREDICTION: No other newspaper companies will file for bankruptcy.

WRONG. By the end of 2008, only Tribune had declared. Since then, the Star-Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, Journal Register Company, and the Philadelphia newspapers made trips to the courthouse, most of them right after the first of the year.

PREDICTION: Several cities, besides Denver, that today still have multiple daily newspapers will become single-newspaper towns.

RIGHT: Hearst closed the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (in print, at least), Gannett closed the Tucson Citizen, making those cities one-paper towns. In February, Clarity Media Group closed the Baltimore Examiner, a free daily, leaving the field to the Sun. And Freedom is closing the East Valley Tribune in Mesa, which cuts out a nearby competitor in the Phoenix metro area.

PREDICTION: Whatever gets announced by the Detroit Newspaper Partnership in terms of frequency reduction will be emulated in several more cities (including both single and multiple newspaper markets) within the first half of the year.

WRONG: Nothing similar to the Detroit arrangement has been tried elsewhere.

PREDICTION: Even if both papers in Detroit somehow maintain a seven-day schedule, we’ll see several other major cities and a dozen or more smaller markets cut back from six or seven days to one to four days per week.

WRONG, mostly: We did see a few other outright closings including the Ann Arbor News (with a replacement paper published twice a week), and some eliminations of one or two publishing days. But only the Register-Pajaronian of Watsonville, Calif. announced it will go from six days to three, back in January.

PREDICTION: As part of that shift, some major dailies will switch their Sunday package fully to Saturday and drop Sunday publication entirely. They will see this step as saving production cost, increasing sales via longer shelf life in stores, improving results for advertisers, and driving more weekend website traffic. The “weekend edition” will be more feature-y, less news-y.

WRONG: This really falls in the department of wishful thinking; it’s a strategy I’ve been advocating for the last year or so to follow the audience to the web, jettison the overhead of printing and delivery, but retain the most profitable portion of the print product.

PREDICTION: There will be at least one, and probably several, mergers between some of the top newspaper chains in the country. Top candidate: Media News merges with Hearst. Dow Jones will finally shed Ottaway in a deal engineered by Boston Herald owner (and recently-appointed Ottaway chief) Pat Purcell.

WRONG AGAIN, but this one is going back into the 2010 hopper. Lack of capital by most of the players, and the perception or hope that values may improve, put a big damper on mergers and acquisitions, but there should be renewed interest ahead.

PREDICTION: Google will not buy the New York Times Co., or any other media property. Google is smart enough to stick with its business, which is organizing information, not generating content. On the other hand, Amazon may decide that they are in the content business…And then there’s the long shot possibility that Michael Bloomberg loses his re-election bid next fall, which might generate a 2010 prediction, if NYT is still independent at that point.

RIGHT about Google, and NOT APPLICABLE about Bloomberg (but Bloomberg did acquire BusinessWeek). The Google-NYT pipe dream still gets mentioned on occasion, but it won’t happen.

PREDICTION: There will be a mini-dotcom bust, featuring closings or fire sales of numerous web enterprises launched on the model of “generate traffic now, monetize later.”

WRONG, at least on the mini-bust scenario. Certainly there were closings of various digital enterprises, but it didn’t look like a tidal wave.

PREDICTION: The fifty newspaper execs who gathered at API’s November Summit for an Industry in Crisis will not bother to reconvene six months later (which would be April) as they agreed to do.

RIGHT. There was a very low-key round two with fewer participants in January, without any announced outcomes, and that was it. [Although there was also the May summit in Chicago, which featured many of the same players. —Ed.]

PREDICTION: Newspaper advertising revenue will decline year-over-year 10 percent in the first quarter and 5 percent in the second. It will stabilize, or nearly so, in the second half, but will have a loss for the year. For the year, newspapers will slip below 12 percent of total advertising revenue (from 15 percent in 2007 and around 13.5 percent in 2008). But online advertising at newspaper sites will resume strong upward growth.

WRONG, and way too optimistic. Full-year results won’t be known for months, but the first three quarters have seen losses in the 30 percent ballpark. Gannett and New York Times have suggested Q4 will come in “better” at “only” about 25 percent down. My 12 percent reference was to newspaper share of the total ad market, a metric that has become harder to track this year due to changes in methodology at McCann, but the actual for 2009 ultimately will sugar out at about 10 percent.

PREDICTION: Newspaper circulation, aggregated, will be steady (up or down no more than 1 percent) in each of the 6-month ABC reporting periods ending March 31 and September 30. Losses in print circulation will be offset by gains in ABC-countable paid digital subscriptions, including facsimile editions and e-reader editions.

WRONG, and also way too optimistic. The March period drop was 7.1 percent, the September drop was 10.6 percent, and digital subscription didn’t have much impact.

PREDICTION: At least 25 daily newspapers will close outright. This includes the Rocky Mountain News, and it will include other papers in multi-newspaper markets. But most closings will be in smaller markets.

WRONG, and too pessimistic. About half a dozen daily papers closed for good during the year.

PREDICTION: One hundred or more independent local startup sites focused on local news will be launched. A number of them will launch weekly newspapers, as well, repurposing the content they’ve already published online. Some of these enterprises are for-profit, some are nonprofit. There will be some steps toward formation of a national association of local online news publishers, perhaps initiated by one of the journalism schools.

Hard to tell, but probably RIGHT. Nobody is really keeping track of how many hyperlocals are active, or their comings and goings. An authoritative central database would be a Good Thing.

PREDICTION: The Dow Industrials will be up 15 percent for the year. The stocks of newspaper firms will beat the market.

RIGHT. The Dow finished the year up 18.8 percent. (This prediction is the one that got the most “you must be dreaming” reactions last year.

And RIGHT about newspapers beating the market (as measured by the Dow Industrials), which got even bigger laughs from the skeptics. There is no index of newspaper stocks, but on the whole, they’ve done well. It helps to have started in the sub-basement at year-end 2008, of course, which was the basis of my prediction. Among those beating the Dow, based on numbers gathered by Poynter’s Rick Edmonds, were New York Times (+69%), AH Belo (+164%), Lee Enterprises (+746%), McClatchy (+343%), Journal Communications (+59%), EW Scripps (+215%), Media General (+348%), and Gannett (+86%). Only Washington Post Co. (+13%) lagged the market. Not listed, of course, are those still in bankruptcy.

PREDICTION: At least one publicly-owned newspaper chain will go private.

NOPE.

PREDICTION: A survey will show that the median age of people reading a printed newspaper at least 5 days per week is is now over 60.

UNKNOWN: I’m not aware of a 2009 survey of this metric, but I’ll wager that the median age figure is correct.

PREDICTION: Reading news on a Kindle or other e-reader will grow by leaps and bounds. E-readers will be the hot gadget of the year. The New York Times, which currently has over 10,000 subscribers on Kindle, will push that number to 75,000. The Times will report that 75 percent of these subscribers were not previously readers of the print edition, and half of them are under 40. The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post will not be far behind in e-reader subscriptions.

UNKNOWN, as far as the subscription counts go: newspapers and Kindle have not announced e-reader subscription levels during the year. The Times now has at least 30,000, as does the Wall Street Journal (according to a post by Staci Kramer in November; see my comment there as well). There have been a number of new e-reader introductions, but none of them look much better than their predecessors as news readers. My guess would be that by year end, the Times will have closer to 40,000 Kindle readers and the Journal 35,000. During 2010, 75,000 should be attainable for the Times, especially counting all e-editions (which include the Times Reader and 53,353 weekdays and 34,435 Sundays for the six months ending Sept. 30.

PREDICTION: The advent of a color Kindle (or other brand color e-reader) will be rumored in November 2009, but won’t be introduced before the end of the year.

RIGHT: plenty of rumors, but no color e-reader, except Fujitsu’s Flepia, which is expensive, experimental, and only for sale in Japan.

PREDICTION: Some newspaper companies will buy or launch news aggregation sites. Others will find ways to collaborate with aggregators.

RIGHT: Hearst launched its topic pages site LMK.com. And various companies are working with EVRI, Daylife and others to bring aggregated feeds to their sites.

PREDICTION: As newsrooms, with or without corporate direction, begin to truly embrace an online-first culture, outbound links embedded in news copy, blog-style, as well as standalone outbound linking, will proliferate on newspaper sites. A reporter without an active blog will start to be seen as a dinosaur.

MORE WISHFUL THINKING, although there’s progress. Many reporters still don’t blog, still don’t tweet, and many papers are still on content management systems that inhibit embedded links.

PREDICTION: The Reuters-Politico deal will inspire other networking arrangements whereby one content generator shares content with others, in return for right to place ads on the participating web sites on a revenue-sharing basis.

YES, we’re seeing more sharing of content, with various financial arrangements.

PREDICTION: The Obama administration will launch a White House wiki to help citizens follow the Changes, and in time will add staff blogs, public commenting, and other public interaction.

NOT SO FAR, although a new Open Government Initiative was recently announced by the White House. This grew out of some wiki-like public input earlier in the year.

PREDICTION: The Washington Post will launch a news wiki with pages on current news topics that will be updated with new developments.

YES — kicked off in January, it’s called WhoRunsGov.com.

PREDICTION: The New York Times will launch a sophisticated new Facebook application built around news content. The basic idea will be that the content of the news (and advertising) package you get by being a Times fan on Facebook will be influenced by the interests and social connections you have established on Facebook. There will be discussion of, if not experimentation with, applying a personal CPM based on social connections, which could result in a rewards system for participating individuals.

NO. Although the Times has continued to come out with innovative online experiments, this was not one of them.

PREDICTION: Craigslist will partner with a newspaper consortium in a project to generate and deliver classified advertising. There will be no new revenue in the model, but the goal will be to get more people to go to newspaper web sites to find classified ads. There will be talk of expanding this collaboration to include eBay.

NO. This still seems like a good idea, but probably it should have happened in 2006 and the opportunity has passed.

PREDICTION: Look for some big deals among the social networks. In particular, Twitter will begin to falter as it proves to be unable to identify a clearly attainable revenue stream. By year-end, it will either be acquired or will be seeking to merge or be acquired. The most likely buyer remains Facebook, but interest will come from others as well and Twitter will work hard to generate an auction that produces a high valuation for the company.

NO DEAL, so far. But RIGHT about Twitter beginning to falter and still having no “clearly attainable” revenue stream in sight. Twitter’s unique visitors and site visits, as measured by Compete.com, peaked last summer and have been declining, slowly, ever since. Quantcast agrees. [But note that neither of those traffic stats count people interacting with Twitter via the API, through Twitter apps, or by texting. —Ed.]

PREDICTION: Some innovative new approaches to journalism will emanate from Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

YES, as described in this post and this post. See also the blogs of Steve Buttry and Chuck Peters. The Cedar Rapids Gazette and its affiliated TV station and web site are in the process of reinventing and reconstructing their entire workflow for news gathering and distribution.

PREDICTION: A major motion picture or HBO series featuring a journalism theme (perhaps a blogger involved in saving the world from nefarious schemes) will generate renewed interest in journalism as a career.

RIGHT. Well, I’m not sure if it has generated renewed interest in journalism as a career, but the movie State of Play featured both print reporters and bloggers. And Julie of Julie & Julia was a blogger, as well. [Bit of a reach there, Martin. —Ed.]

—

[ADDENDUM: I posted about Martin's predictions when he made them and wrote this:

I’d agree with most, although (a) I think there will be at least one other newspaper company bankruptcy, (b) I think Q3/Q4 revenue numbers will be down from 2008, not flat, (c) circ will be down, not stable, (d) newspaper stocks won’t beat the market, (e) the Kindle boom won’t be as big as he thinks for newspapers, and (f) Twitter won’t be in major trouble in [2009] — Facebook is more likely to feel the pinch with its high server-farm costs.

I was right on (a), (b), and (c) and wrong on (d). Gimme half credit for (f), since Twitter is now profitable and Facebook didn’t seem too affected by server expenses. Uncertain on (e), but I’ll eat my hat if “75 percent of [NYT Kindle] subscribers were not previously readers of the print edition, and half of them are under 40.” —Josh]

Photo of fortune-teller postcard by Cheryl Hicks used under a Creative Commons license.

— The Kindle remains a half-hearted medium for news, an awkward mix of book-centric tech and news organizations searching for marginal revenue. Here’s TPM top boss Josh Marshall:

There are many fewer Kindles out there than iPhones, let alone Blackberries. But even among Kindle users, demand didn’t seem too great. A lot of you said that you love it for books. But it’s just not made for rapidly changing information, our more iterative style of writing and reporting. And it’s also not great visually for anything but pure text. Another way of saying this is that it’s designed for books, which of course it is. Just speaking for myself, and as someone who’s become an avid user of my Kindle for books, I think I agree.

By contrast, “we’ve got a lot of readers who are very into their Palm Pre mobile devices,” Marshall reports, although they still lag far behind iPhone users in numbers.

— TPM is exploring a membership model that aims to draw money out of its most dedicated readers without putting all its content behind a paywall. That’s a model a number of newspaper companies are coming around to as they wrestle with the need to generate revenue from readers but realize the drawbacks of putting all content under lock and key for those who won’t pay. Here’s Marshall describing the outlines of what they’re thinking:

TPM would never put up any sort of pay-wall in front of our content. It’s completely antithetical to both our editorial and our business model. But we are actively considering a membership program in which people who are really into TPM could pay a few bucks a month — say the cost of a coffee at Starbucks — for a series of extra services and tools — for instance, several times a week video-based live teleconferences with TPM reporters and editors in which you’d be able to ask follow-up questions to stories, ask about the reporting process on certain issues we’re covering, whatever. That’s just one example. But the key would be these would be things that we don’t think there’d necessarily ever be a mass audience for but which would still take a decent investment of staff time and in some cases tech-time to do. So a membership framework, with a small monthly fee, makes sense.

…we’ve discussed having access to customized versions of TPM for particular mobile devices be a benefit of becoming a member of the site. But we’re still considering whether that’s a direction we’d want to go — mainly because I think some of these mobile platforms may eventually become dominant ways to read the site, perhaps even rivaling the number of people who read TPM on the web…

Marshall also mentions as potential membership benefits mobile breaking-news alerts, customized story selection, and aggregated polling data on elections of interest. While TPM has a different heritage than traditional newspapers do, there are many news organizations running a similar set of ideas through their business-side meetings these days.

I’ve been a regular TPM reader since 2000, back when it was hosted on a subdirectory of Josh’s personal site, and the site’s tone and content mix have shifted over time as its audience has evolved from hard-core political junkies and blogophiles to a broader audience with a more casual political interest. When Marc Andreessen invested in a TPM growth strategy this summer, the future-of-journalism side of me was thrilled to see Josh get a chance to expand and evolve. But the TPM-reader side was a little worried that, in the process of reaching for a bigger audience, TPM might evolve into something a little more pageview-hungry, a little more Politico. So revenue aside, I’m heartened to see TPM thinking about new ways to satisfy its core audience. As Slate’s David Plotz put it last week, sometimes there’s more value to be drawn from a devoted core readership than from a broader but fickle one.

I’ve been skeptical of the impact of Kindles and Kindle-like devices on newspaper business models. And I think that’s been borne out — we learned earlier this week that The Los Angeles Times has only 2,700 Kindle subscribers, which produces roughly the revenue required to pay for one reporter.

But the Nook also has the potential to differentiate itself from the Kindle to newspaper publishers — none of whom are particularly happy about their financial arrangements with Amazon. Amazon gets to set the prices newspapers sell for, and it keeps 70 percent of the revenue.

I emailed B&N’s P.R. people to ask whether the revenue share might be any different for the Nook, and where pricing power would rest. I got what amounts to a “no comment.” (“Barnes & Noble has strong relationships with publishers including newspapers and magazines…we’re reaching out to all of our publishing partners to work together,” etc.)

I also asked what other newspapers were among the “more than 20″ that would be available for subscription on the Nook. (The announcement mentioned only the big four: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Los Angeles Times.) B&N declined to say.

Can anyone on the financial side of a soon-to-be-Nooked newspaper tell us about Barnes & Noble’s approach? Are they offering a revenue share better than Amazon’s?

While the New York Times newsroom deals with another round of job cuts, one area of the newspaper is actually growing. Fourteen jobs are currently open at the Times website, most of them for software developers and engineers.

On Thursday, the digital staff gathered for an “all hands” meeting at TheTimesCenter to hear updates on various initiatives in advertising, business development, and content. Hanging in the air was the still unresolved question of whether the Times will charge for portions of its website. (Some readers were clamoring for that yesterday.)

Denise Warren, general manager of NYTimes.com, said the company is in “strategic limbo,” and Bill Keller, the executive editor, acknowledged frustration over the delay:

…everyone feels a little paralyzed by the unresolved question of pay versus free. I let Denise edit my remarks and she edited out expressions like “quagmire” and “time suck.” But we all feel a little sense of frustration about how long that’s taking, even though I think we understand that if it were a theological decision, it would be made by now. But, unfortunately, it’s a business decision.

Keller and Jill Abramson, the managing editor, took on more responsibility for the website when Jonathan Landman, the masthead editor formerly in charge of digital operations, recently shifted to the culture desk. To prepare, Keller said he and Abramson have been attending meetings with web staff and, as I wrote yesterday, trying to read the Times mostly online.

He also ticked off seven “questions that loom largest to us at the moment”:

1. the future role of Times Topics and other “living articles”
2. openness of Times content, integration of non-Times content, and social media
3. integration of print and digital operations, particularly for department heads
4. improved collaboration between technologists and the newsroom
5. thinking “web first”
6. a stronger strategy for cell phones and other mobile devices
7. redesigning Times article pages to create “an engine of engagement”

It’s not an earth-shattering speech, but it’s a peek at a large organization that, like its competitors, is trying to best integrate its print and digital operations. Keller describes prioritizing the web at the Times as “our Manhattan Project.”

Video of the meeting, which Warren declared “off the record,” was posted on an internal Times server and provided to us. Here’s a transcript of Keller’s remarks:

I’m just half of Bill and Jill. [laughter] In the weeks since Jill and I said that we wanted to talk on more of the direct responsibility for the digital parts of our newsroom, we’ve been immersing ourselves, meeting one-on-one or two-on-one with a lot of people in this room, with the leaders in the digital newsroom, technology, product, advertising, multimedia, social networking, video, and so on.

I’ve been telling people that it feels a little like we just enrolled in graduate school, but we forgot to take any of the undergraduate courses on the way there. You know, it’s a little exhausting and overwhelming, but as we get better acquainted with all of you, we’ve found it tremendously rewarding. We’ve discovered, or I should say, rediscovered that we’re blessed with an amazing staff of people whose skills are dazzling, whose values are completely ours, and whose loyalty to this venture runs as deep as the loyalty of anybody else in the organization.

And we’ve been, for the most part, impressed by how well the system works. That’ll come as a surprise to all of you who fret over the many things that ought to work better. There are plenty of kinks in the system, and that doesn’t even count the fact that everyone feels a little paralyzed by the unresolved question of pay versus free. I let Denise edit my remarks, and she edited out expressions like “quagmire” and “time suck.” [laughter] But we all feel a little sense of frustration about how long that’s taking, even though I think we understand that if it were a theological decision, it would be made by now. But, unfortunately, it’s a business decision.

We will decide on pay versus free, and I hope after that, that Jill and I can help smooth out some of the kinks that you find frustrating. I mean, there’s clearly a lot that we can do better. But I did want to start by saying that the system works a lot more than it doesn’t work. We’ve established a reputation as the most innovative online publisher in the business. We’ve forged a constructive working relationship between the newsroom and advertising, which Jill and I intend to continue. We’ve launched some big ambitious projects. We’ve set a standard that can be measured not only by traffic and awards but by pilgrims visiting from other newsrooms that want to copy us. And even by the fact that Apple sees our homepage as the place to try out its most creative advertising — a mixed blessing, that one.

In our indoctrination period, Jill and I have been trying to do three things. First, we’ve been seeking advice on how to educate ourselves better about the issues that we face. I will not pretend that I’m going to master the intricacies of digital the way Jon Landman did. Jon’s about the smartest guy I know, and he also had the luxury of mostly detaching himself from a lot of the other problems in the newsroom, little things like the print editions and the non-digital budget. But there are two of us, we are trainable, and we don’t start out as total strangers to the digital world.

The single best advice we’ve gotten, I think, is to spend some time living without print. And we’ve both been trying to do that, trying to experience The New York Times and our competition mostly on screens — iPhone, laptop, Kindle, Times Reader –- trying to better understand the joys and frustrations of our journalism delivered online.

Our other indispensable source of education is you. I urge you all to send us things that you think we’ll find interesting, drop by to tell us about accomplishments or problems, invite us to stuff. In the early days of our education, especially, we would rather have too much thrown at us than too little, so invite us, and if we don’t come the first time, don’t give up. Invite us again.

Our second aim during this period has been to plug ourselves more formally into the process. To figure out which people and which meetings need to be on our calendar, so that we’re not too far behind the curve. In the early weeks, we’ve been going to a lot of things, planning to narrow or adjust the docket as time passes, so that we can focus on the matters that really need our focus.

We also need to figure out our division of labor: where Jill goes, where I go. The digital culture seems to love its meetings, including some large meetings that go on for a long time and don’t necessarily get to the end of things. For those of us who come from the world of snap judgments made on deadline, this represents a bit of an adjustment, but maybe we’ll meet somewhere in the middle.

The third and really the most important thing that we’ve been trying to do in these early weeks is to begin to set out some priorities. Not priorities for the institution. We have an elaborate process for setting company and newsroom priorities. I’m talking about priorities for where we should be focusing our immediate attention. Aside from the obvious issue of the pay debate, where should our energy be?

We’ve elicited from you and your colleagues many suggestions on that score. We’ve begun to home in on a few big questions that seem likely to be our first orders of business. All of them are important questions whether or not we adopt a pay model, and all of them are aimed at enhancing both the quality of the site and the revenue potential. So I will lay out a few things that, in broad strokes, are the questions that we intend to be most focused on in the next couple of months.

One is, where are we going with topics pages and living articles? How large a priority should that be, and if it’s a major venture for us, then shouldn’t it have the leadership and resources required to really make it grow?

A second question is, what is the best strategy for community? Over the past year or so we’ve opened up to the world, both in the development of APIs and in the inclusion of content from outsiders. Some people find this openness a little unnerving, fear it will erode our quality and authority. I think most of the people in this room believe openness is essential for our engagement and growth, and we should be doing as much of it — as much as we can to facilitate it.

One thing that jumps out from the analytics is that users under 35 — our future — are vastly more likely to be using social networking sites to share our articles, photos and multimedia. At the moment we have community-building endeavors underway in several places. We have TimesPeople, we have the new conversation tools that debuted in health care, we have Jennifer’s social-networking portfolio, and so on. So how do we make sure that all of our innovative intelligence is working in the same direction on community?

A third issue for us is how to spread the gospel of integration more fully in the newsroom. I think everyone agrees that over the past four-plus years, we’ve come a long way in breaking down the psychological, cultural, and organizational barriers that isolated print from digital. But the gospel still needs preaching, and I think the next congregation we will focus on is the department heads. The department heads all, to one degree or another, support the website, but they need to engage it more. They need to be, to quote one of you, “more than web tourists.” We need to spread the word that the Well blog or The Caucus blog is as important and as integral to our future success as stories on A1 of the printed paper.

Fourth on my list is, we want to make sure we have the best possible working relationship between technology, product, and the newsroom. We understand that The New York Times is, and has to be, a technology company as well as a journalism company. We want to make sure that that collaboration is optimized to achieve our journalistic and commercial ambitions.

Fifth, how do we assure that “web first” is getting the priority it needs? One of you described web first to us as our Manhattan Project, and I think that’s what it ought to be. As long as we’re doing journalism on separate publishing systems, we will not be an integrated newsroom. We will not think and plan our journalism with the web in the front of our mind.

Sixth, we need to figure out the right journalistic product to deliver to mobile platforms and devices. I’m hoping we can get the newsroom more actively involved in the challenge of delivering our best journalism in the form of Times Reader, iPhone apps, WAP, or the impending Apple slate, or whatever comes after that.

And seventh, we’re going to paying close attention to article-page redesign. As proud as we are of all the exciting new things that we keep inventing to grab hold of our audience, we can’t lose sight of the basic site experience. The article pages are a major point of entry, and we need to turn them into an engine of engagement.

That’s a lot of big stuff, and it’s not complete. This isn’t just the list — this isn’t the list of everything that’s important, or everything that’s going to be done, or everything that we’ll be thinking about, but those are the questions that loom largest to us at the moment. Before I turn the mic over to Jill, I just want to underscore that we know we have a big vacuum to fill, and we know we have a lot to prove, and we’re counting on you to help us get it right. Thanks.

John Temple, former publisher of the defunct Rocky Mountain News, suggested in July that newspaper editors spend time exclusively reading news on the web, but Keller (and Times managing editor Jill Abramson) are the first I know who have tried it. I emailed Keller to see how the experiment is going, and he obliged with some observations on comprehensiveness, serendipity, and the “balky and drab” experience of reading the Times on a Kindle:

It’s been about three weeks of consuming my NYT (and competition) mostly in digital forms: desktop (the website proper), TimesReader (on a notebook), iPhone and Kindle. In truth, I cheat some on weekends. I love print, and while this experience is making me appreciate more the versatility and creativity of our web staff, nothing has yet made me love print less. A few quick, early-days observations:

Because I’m reading not just as a consumer of news but as the editor of the report, I value a sense of comprehensiveness — not that I’ve read every word, watched every video, perused every photograph — but that I haven’t overlooked anything of note. That may not be a priority for people who aren’t in charge of a newsroom, but for me it is. I find that in all the digital manifestations, because they are demand driven, I miss stuff that I’d have noticed in the print paper.

Of course, online there is more stuff to miss. The abundance is amazing. The videos are intelligent and often ravishing, stand-alone journalism of a high order. Comments give me a rough sense of how stories are playing with our audience, and when they are well moderated they often enrich the experience of a story. I’m especially smitten by the conversation tool we’ve debuted on our health reform page — what out website folks call the bento box — which lets you dive into concentrated discussion on many slices of the health care debate. If you want proof of our boast that our readers are exceptionally smart and engaged, go there.

I’ve found that I’m quite comfortable reading long-form journalism on a screen. Although I read the David Rohde series on his kidnapping twice before publication, I’ve read each installment online with pleasure.

The conventional gripe print-lovers make about online news is the lack of serendipity. But, of course, the website and various apps offer alternative forms of serendipity — the most e-mailed list, recommendations from people in my TimesPeople universe, tweets from fellow readers. All of those alert me to interesting work I might not have gone looking for on my own.

Of the various platforms, I find NYTimes.com on a desktop the most satisfying, but, obviously, the least portable. TimesReader comes closest to the pleasure of a printed paper, but a notebook is not ideal: great for a plane ride, not so great for a subway ride. I like the Kindle fine for books, but for a newspaper it seems a bit balky and drab. Love the iPhone app but, like AP, BBC and all the other news apps that scroll through a list of headlines, it inevitably feels linear. I find myself wondering whether anyone — even the geniuses at Apple — can come up with a single device that combines the advantages and conveniences of these various platforms. Or that makes me quite as happy as curling up with the Sunday paper spread around me.

(I added the links in Keller’s text.)

I don’t own an iPhone, but I play with one on TV. Apple’s widely praised ads, with their relentless focus on the phone itself, have demonstrated the magic of its mobile device even to those of us who cling to our BlackBerries. Lately, I’ve been made aware that the iPhone can shoot and edit video and level a bookshelf.

But most of all, I know how good the New York Times website looks on the iPhone. Since the first TV spots in 2007, Apple has chosen to demonstrate its mobile browser almost exclusively with NYTimes.com. And that makes the Times very happy indeed.

“The Times recently secured prime product placement in conjunction with the release of Apple’s iPhone 3G S,” crowed Scott Heekin-Canedy, who runs the business side at the Times, in a memo to staffers last week. He listed all of the newspaper’s cameos in Apple’s latest marketing campaign, including: the homepage in a spot demonstrating copy-and-paste, Inauguration Day coverage in the guided tour, and the Times iPhone app in Apple’s “staff picks.” He also noted, “We’re used to illustrate the iPhone as a ‘breakthrough Internet device’ and ‘it works like no other phone: multi-touch.’”

Not long ago, Apple sought to improve its own brand by linking the PowerBook with Mission: Impossible and, more recently, landing its products on The Office, 24, and seemingly all of HBO’s programming short of Deadwood. Legacy newspapers, meanwhile, have generally relied on history, name recognition, and those boxes on every downtown street corner as their most powerful marketing tools.

But the iPhone campaign demonstrates how in a digital age, device makers from Apple to Amazon enjoy immense power to which news organizations may be unavoidably beholden. In his memo, Heekin-Canedy explained, “Not only does this raise awareness of our iPhone app, but it also extends our innovation message through close alignment with one of today’s top brands.”

I asked Diane McNulty, a spokeswoman for the Times, if the newspaper has paid for its product placement in Apple’s marketing. She replied, “Actually, they asked us if they could feature NYTimes.com in their promotion — and we were happy to oblige.” Apple has run several huge, animated ads on the Times homepage since last year.

On laptop and desktop computers, consumers can rely on a diversity of news and information sources — a diversity that undermines the notion of a newspaper site as a reader’s single source of news. But the mobile space — with its emphasis on individual news-organization-built applications — may present a better opportunity for some news sites to serve as one-stop shops of information for readers checking the news in spare moments. And in that sense, the Times has much to gain from its association with the iPhone’s browser.

Other news organizations could attempt analogous marketing relationships with the Amazon’s Kindle, RIM’s BlackBerry, Palm’s Pre, TechCrunch’s forthcoming CrunchPad, and so on. Instead, companies like Hearst are attempting to produce their own mobile devices. That may work, but associating with an already strong brand seems more reliable than completely reinventing your own.

The New York Times website, nytimes.com, is considering charging a monthly fee of $5.00 to access its content, including all its articles, blogs and multimedia.

It also asked about a $2.50-a-month “discounted fee” for print subscribers.

What bugs me most about that survey isn’t the idea that the Times wants to charge for its web site. As a news consumer, I love having the world’s newspapers free and a click away. But I know enough about the financial situations of most American newspapers — and the desperation they feel about their tumbling revenue numbers — that I’ve come to accept that we’re going to see a lot more experimentation with charging for access in the coming months. I wouldn’t be shocked if the majority of major American newspapers erected some sort of pay wall by year’s end.

No, what bugs me most is that the Times is thinking about charging so little.

The Times is the premier brand in American journalism, and it appeals to an elite audience. Charging anything for access to a newspaper web site is going to drive away a lot of readers. But if you’re going to charge and go through the massive dislocation of turning something free into something with a price tag — charging just $5 makes it seem like a damaged item in the discount bin. Here are three arguments for why the Times — if it’s going to charge — should charge more:

— Five bucks a month doesn’t generate enough revenue to make a dent in the paper’s problems. Hamilton Nolan at Gawker notes approvingly that “if all 650,000 print subscribers paid $5 a month for the website, that would be an instant $39 million per year.” That’s likely very optimistic, since the Times is talking about half-off for print subscribers — and, of course, a hefty portion of Times print subscribers are plenty happy with a print-only lifestyle. But let’s say half of print subscribers sign up at $2.50 a month. That’s $19.5 million a year.

How about online-only readers? The Times Select experiment topped out at a little over 200,000 subscribers and $10 million in annual revenue; that was at $50 a year and covered only a small fraction of the Times’ content. Let’s imagine the number of non-subscribers willing to pay is now three times what it used to be. At $5 a month, that’s $36 million.

This is obviously back-of-the-envelope stuff — and I suspect it’s an optimistic envelope — but that’s about $55 million a year. The New York Times Media Group (which also includes the International Herald Tribune) had revenue of $396 million in the first quarter. In other words, this probably optimistic estimate would bump up revenues by about 3.5 percent. And that’s before you factor in the inevitable loss of online advertising revenue, no matter how semi-permeable the pay wall ends up being.

At a time when advertising revenues are cratering — and nytimes.com is the single strongest untapped asset the newspaper has — to go through all the dislocation of a pay wall for only a tiny bump in revenue doesn’t seem worth it.

— It ignores the lessons of micropayments. There’s been plenty of debate over Chris Anderson’s Free, but one of his strongest arguments is that there’s a huge mental gap between something that’s free and something that costs even a tiny amount. The mental transaction cost of paying for something when free options are available is very real. But the flip side of that is that the fear newspaper execs have about charging for their web sites should be primarily about the act of charging — not about the specific price point.

The Times is well aware that mental transaction costs are a big hurdle; that’s why they’re down on micropayments as a solution. As Scott Heekin-Canedy, New York Times Media Group president/GM, said recently:

Our general view is that micropayments are too cumbersome. It is just like getting in a taxi and the meter is running for every word or page you consume. It creates an anxiety that just doesn’t belong here.

Anderson writes about a Dan Ariely experiment in which people are faced with the choice of “buying” a 14-cent chocolate truffle or a free Hershey’s Kiss. Sixty-nine percent chose the free Kiss. When the prices were hiked a penny — 15 cents for the truffle and 1 cent for the formerly free Kiss — 73 percent chose the truffle. (Some folks disagree about the specific numbers.)

One lesson to draw from this is that free is a very attractive price, and that charging anything above zero will drive away a lot of customers. And that will no doubt happen if the Times puts all its news behind a pay wall.

But the other lesson is that, once you get past that zero barrier, you have more flexibility with pricing. Raising the price of a truffle from 14 to 15 cents didn’t drive everyone away.

Or to look at it another way: If someone is willing to pay $5 a month for the Times, wouldn’t they probably also be willing to pay $6? Or $7? There are probably some people for whom there really is a magical cut off at $5.75 or whatever. But I’d wager the vast majority of people who are willing to pay $5 would also be willing to pay $10. And a big chunk would be willing to pay $15. The big hurdle is from free to non-free, getting people to actually turn over their credit cards and commit to paying anything. Once you’re past that, setting too low a price is leaving money on the table.

— It sets an implicit ceiling on what other newspapers can charge. Say you’re an exec at The Seattle Times, or The Kansas City Star, or my old paper, The Dallas Morning News. You’re bleeding heavily; your newsroom is maybe half what it used to be, and the numbers aren’t getting any better. You’re thinking about how you can get away with charging for your web site to generate some revenue.

Then you hear that the Times — the gold standard of American newspapers — thinks its web site is worth about $5 (or $2.50) a month. How much pricing room does that leave you? Once that becomes the top of the market, what are you stuck with — three bucks a month?

We already have a marketplace for digital news to compare this to. On the Kindle, the Times costs $13.99 a month, but regional papers price themselves are priced at somewhat less ($9.99 for the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Arizona Republic) or a lot less ($5.99 for the Seattle Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Houston Chronicle). If that gap in prices carries over at all into how newspaper value their web sites, everyone who’s not the Times (or the Wall Street Journal and maybe Washington Post or Los Angeles Times) is going to be stuck in the bargain bin before they even start charging. (Update: Someone pointed out to me that Amazon sets Kindle subscription pricing, not newspapers — my apologies. But if anything, I think that strengthens the argument, since Amazon has the richest data across publishers of what digital subscribers will stand for and is presumably trying to maximize its revenues.)

(Kindle pricing also forces the question: If Times stories without video, without interactivity, without color — and without all the other stuff at nytimes.com — are worth $14 a month on the Kindle, why in the world is the web site only worth $5?)

What price would I set for nytimes.com? There are plenty of smart business people at the Times, and they have access to a lot more data (like those survey results) than I do. But I think charging anything less than $10 a month devalues the product and doesn’t maximize revenue.

Now it appears Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is betting on something similar, promising a conference audience that he was happy to give his hardware people “competition” by putting Kindle-format books on “other mobile devices and other computing devices” at the same price as on the Kindle itself. As Gizmodo puts it, “either Bezos has something mysterious up his sleeve, or he’s come to terms with the fact that the Kindle — and indeed every dedicated e-reader — is essentially a stopgap device, awkwardly carrying out its single, simple task until something more versatile comes along.”

On the format front, Amazon is facing renewed competition, as it should when it’s taking a ridiculous 70 percent of revenue. But I have a lot more faith in the Kindle format beating out rivals than the kludgy Kindle device doing the same. Meanwhile, for newspapers counting on the Kindle as an economic savior, get ready for the same sort of platform-agnostic commoditization that drives content prices to zero.

You now have two new ways to get your Nieman Journalism Lab fix.

First, you can become our fan on Facebook. While we like having “fans” as much as anybody, the real reason you’d want to do so is that our Twitter feed will be integrated into your Facebook news feed, alongside your friends’ kvetching about their most recent meal. You’ll get 15 or so links about the future of journalism every weekday, gathered from around the web and curated by us here at the Lab. It’s a great way to stay informed, and if you’re the kind of person who spends all day reloading Facebook instead of Twitter, now you can get our stuff where you want it.

(If you’re not already reading our Twitter feed, note that Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, says that our feed is the sort of thing he’d have paid £100,000 for not long ago. [See around 6:55 into the video.] Alan, we’ll still take your money! But for you, dear reader, it’s free.)

At the moment, our Twitter feed is the only thing happening on our Facebook fan page. But if you have any suggestions or ideas on how we could use it better, we’re all ears. And of course if you just wanted to become a fan just to show that you like our content, we’d appreciate that, too.

Second, you can now subscribe to this blog on an Amazon Kindle. I remain a skeptic about the Kindle, and I am even more of one about reading blogs on one. First off, any link in a blog post takes you to the awful, maddening “experimental” web browser. And subscribing to a blog costs $0.99 or $1.99 a month, despite those same blogs’ availability for free on the real Internet. (We’re a $1.99 blog, although that was entirely Amazon’s decision. We’d give it away for free if they’d let us. And Amazon takes a 70 percent cut of all subscription revenue, just as with newspapers, so we won’t be getting rich off it.)

Still, some people love their Kindles, so we’re on it if that’s where you want to read us.

We’re also working on a few other ways to get our stuff in front of you; more to come on that. And of course there are also the traditional routes: subscribing to our RSS feed in your favorite reader; following us on Twitter; or just coming to the site whenever you get a hankering.

Here’s the second of our videos from inside the research and development lab at The New York Times Co., where they’re envisioning how news will be consumed in two to ten years. (You can catch up on the series here.) Some of the goodies you’ll notice: a Samsung tablet, an iPhone, a Sony Bravia TV, and an application called CustomTimes that they’ve developed to work on all three devices.

The R&D group is obsessed with the ability to seamlessly transition among web-enabled gadgets. They’re not convinced that the future will land on a single, multipurpose contraption — like some sort of Kindle meets Chumby meets Minority Report. Instead, they predict consumers will connect to the Internet through their cars, on their televisions, over mobile networks, and in traditional browsers, while expecting those devices to interact and sync with each other.

Nick Bilton, the group’s design integration editor who narrated yesterday’s video, and Michael Young, the lead creative technologist who stars in today’s installment, won a major hacking event in 2007 with their startup Shifd (pronounced “shift”), which is an attempt to achieve some of that cloud-like portability. And the same philosophy is evident in the way they’ve conceived CustomTimes (which, it should be noted, is more a proof of concept than a product on its way to the marketplace).

One term I didn’t hear in our visit to the R&D lab last week was “platform agnostic,” a concept once championed by Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman to describe how the newspaper would offer its content on any medium desired by the audience, from e-readers to television.

That philosophy remains intact, I think, but the phrase’s meaning is worth some thought. One of the more pointed passages in Mark Bowden’s recent Vanity Fair profile of Sulzberger was a quote from Tom Rosenstiel, director of Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism:

When I first heard Arthur talk about being platform agnostic, I knew he was trying to suggest that he was not stuck in a newspaper mind-set. But I thought there were two problems with that language. One is, agnostics are people who don’t—who aren’t sure what they believe in. That’s the first problem. And the second problem is, in practice, there is no such thing as being platform agnostic. You actually have to choose which platform you work on first, which one comes first. [...] Platform agnostic means that all the online companies are going to zoom past you, because they’re going to exploit that technology while you’re sitting there thinking, Well, we don’t care which platform we put it on. You need to exploit the technology of each platform. You need to be, in fact, not platform agnostic but platform orthodox.

There’s no doubt that the R&D group — and probably Sulzberger, too — agrees with Rosentiel’s point. (In tomorrow’s video, you’ll see one way that they’re attempting to repackage multimedia content for different platforms.) But I think “platform orthodox” is a useful perspective from which to assess their work: How well does CustomTimes prepare for our gadget-juggling future?

A full transcript of today’s video is after the jump.

Michael Young: So I want to show you something we’re calling the CustomTimes. It’s our vision of a three- or four-screen application with customized or personalized version of The New York Times on web, mobile, TV in the living room, and then potentially in the car.

So we’ll start with the web component. I’m just showing a website here on a Samsung tablet. The idea is that you would come to it and you would initially configure it and you would seed it by selecting some sections from The New York Times of content that you want to follow. So just a very simple, clean interface here, a couple sections selected. Actually, I have them all selected. Let me uncheck a couple. Save this here. And what we do is we customize a web version here with all the sections that I selected. I’ll just scroll through quickly. Very clean, simple UI, headline summaries, and images when we have it. So now you will get the same information across the web, across your phone, and in your living room.  

So let me show you a couple of other concepts we have here. Next to each of these articles is a flag button. And the idea here is that anything on any of these sites — web, mobile, living room — you can take a piece of content, whether it’s a story or a graphic or video, and you flag it to either watch it later or read it later on a different platform. So one example is if I have video on the website here, I could flag it and say, send it to my living room. I want to watch it in HD when I get home. Another option is at the end of the day, if you had a couple of articles you didn’t read, you could flag it and say, send it to my car. And on some of the new cars, what we’re going to try to do is do text-to-speech on the article, send it to the car, and have it read to you on the way home.

So earlier I had flagged a couple of videos that I would want to watch in the living room when I got home. We have a George Clooney, a Mark Bittman, and a third one here. So they’re sitting and waiting for me on the TV. Here is the Mark Bittman piece. So I can use my TV remote to play these, but also now that these devices are becoming connected, I can use any of these devices as the remote.

So if I start to, if I click on George here, I could play the video on this device, but as I start to take him and drag him up, you’ll see this blue panel drop down from the top. So it’s the devices that I’m near or that I’m connected to. And you’ll see a little TV icon pop up there. So if I just drag George up to the TV and drop him there, the video will start to play on the TV.

[George Clooney video plays on TV.]

[...] So the same idea: here is this flag section on the CustomTimes and, again, George Clooney video sitting there waiting for me. And now we built some sensors into the software with CustomTimes so that it knows what devices are on the same network. So I don’t know if you can see it here, but next, underneath the George Clooney link, there’s a play link.  So for any video that’s on the phone here, it knows that I’m now in the room near the TV, and it gives me the option to play it on the TV. So the same idea: I can hit play here and it will play the George Clooney video on the TV. [...]

But we’re also looking at how advertising and brand messages from advertisers to fit into this world. So right here I have one of our new ad units for the website that are actually going to go live this summer. It’s just one of the new OPA units. It’s just an expandable ad. So we wanted to look at this to say, what parts of advertising, you know, could we send to a TV if we wanted to, for example? So in this case, it’s a Ralph Lauren ad that we mocked up. Any component of the ad I can actually take to look on the TV on a larger screen. So if it was, in this case it’s shots from the runway. So if I saw this and wanted to have a better look at some of these clothes, again I could just take this and drag it up to the TV and see the high-res image of this on the television. And you can do that with video, you can do that with slide shows from the runway, really any content from the ad message.

The New York Times Co.’s research and development group has some of the best views in their midtown skyscraper — 24 floors above the newsrooms, higher even than the executives’ suites. Developers in the core R&D group — with titles like “lead creative technologist” and, my favorite, “futurist-in-residence” — are charged by the brass 14 floors below them with anticipating how news will next be consumed.

Among their hunches: in the living room.

Josh and I visited the R&D group last week, and this week we’ll be running five videos showing how they’re looking at the future of news. Today we begin with design integration editor Nick Bilton, who runs through their thinking on e-reader devices, news consumption outside the web browser, and interactive advertising.

You’ll notice there’s a marketing or advertising component to nearly all of what the group is working on. While this is the first time much of the lab has been seen publicly, they’ve given similar tours to more than a hundred advertisers and agencies, Bilton told us. And keep in mind the company has an interest in appearing ahead of the curve to investors.

They drink better coffee in the R&D group, not the burnt stuff chugged by reporters on deadline. Maybe that’s because they have time to let the grinds brew: what they’re envisioning won’t reach anyone’s living room for at least two years — if at all.

Up there on the 28th floor, the group’s toys — e-readers torn apart, touchscreen displays, netbooks that bend in every direction — can feel a touch presumptuous for a company surviving debt payment to debt payment. It was just this winter when Michael Hirschorn loudly suggested in The Atlantic that the Times Co. could go out of business, “like, this May.” The Times will endure, in one form or another, and the R&D group is the beta version of the company’s future.

You’ll find the details of what Bilton and his colleagues are thinking about in each of the five videos, and I’ll address some of their key ideas as the week progresses. (Note: In today’s video, Bilton demos an Adobe AIR application that’s very similar to Times Reader 2.0, which is set for release this week.) There’s a full transcript of the video after the jump, and be sure to come back each day this week for more from our visit.

Nick Bilton: This is the core R&D group, and these are just some of the projects we’re working on. This is what we call the newspaper 2.0 table, and it’s looking at these next generation of reader devices and really trying to stay ahead of the curve with these devices.

There’s two things that we are doing here. One is trying to educate the company on where these devices are going, but the other thing is actually prototyping content on them. So this is an E Ink development kit that actually was broken in transit from Vegas last week. It’s a little chipped, but this was a device that we got from E Ink where we prototyped what content would look like on an E-Ink device that didn’t exist yet. And so we have the full layout with the typography and different user interactions that we can experiment with. And so this is really trying to prototype and understand where these devices are before they even exist and what our content will look like and how it will translate.

This is just some flexible e-ink. There is a big push for flexible displays and devices and where they’ll be. There’s been some breakthroughs in the past six months that will allow devices to become more flexible with the PCBs being more flexible, the chips are going to start to become more flexible over the next few years. And that’s really going to change these devices. The one question is: How do you tell someone that it’s bendable but not foldable? So.

Josh Benton: Gotta educate the customer.

Bilton: Gotta educate the customer. And then, you know, a lot of it is just trying to understand the user interaction and really trying to work with the manufacturers. We work with Sony and Kindle and all these guys. We work with this guy Rob Samuels, who is the project manager at nytimes.com for these devices, and we’re trying to work with all the device manufacturers to say, you know, this is how our content should work and how it should follow through.

Another big thing that we always explore are the netbooks. These put a whole different generation of people online, and we’ve been looking at how you tell stories on these machines. You know, some of them have foldable screens, some of the are touchscreen, they’re all different sizes, and we really have to understand how our content, the stories are told on there.

An interesting technology that is going to affect the e-book reader industry in the next year or so is the screen from the One Laptop Per Child. Mary Lou Jepsen came from One Laptop Per Child. She invented the screen, which is actually called Pixel Qi — Pixel Q-I. It’s based off the E-Ink technology and LCD, and it’s mashed together, and it creates a color version of E-Ink that you can actually switch between this LCD with full movement to E-Ink in low-light situations and low power and things like that. So she’s going to be shipping those devices, the screens in November or so which means that we’ll probably start seeing them in the market place in the next year or year and a half, which should be really interesting.

We talk a bit about making the paper more interactive and adding functionality. This is just a tikitag RFID chip, and so here is an ad for Chanel. So if I could put this on my computer, it will go off and get the appropriate ad that goes along with that. So it automatically knows because it’s RFID, it’s connected that it’s Chanel ad that goes along with this experience.

So it’s just really trying to explore and understand where RFIDs — there’s this company in Boston that’s starting to explore printing RFID in paper at a penny to five cents a piece, which could really open up different areas for advertising.  

As far as working with reporters, these are different GPS devices that we’ve been playing around with. We’ve given some to some reporters, and it actually automatically geocodes where they are, and whenever the time stamp of the story is uploaded. It then cross-correlates it and says, this is where this story or this photo has been filed from, or this photo, and it automatically puts it on the map.  And it’s a whole different method of story-telling that nobody is really required to get involved with. It does it automatically. So we did this with the Frugal Traveler and a couple of other reporters, and it’s been pretty interesting to see that happen.

Another application, going back to these news reader devices is, I mean, we’re looking at touchscreen constantly. [Dialog box appears on screen.] Thank you, Windows. [Laughter] This is the International Herald Tribune Reader that we’ve been working on with Adobe, and it’s built on Adobe AIR. And one of the really interesting features of it is that it can reformat and re-lay itself out accordingly depending on what size display it’s in. So if I’m on a screen this big, it will format and lay itself out. If I’m on a screen the size of one of those little notebooks it will, it’ll re-lay itself out that way. It does the same thing on the article level if I want to resize the font, I can go smaller and it reformats itself and fits in that thing.  

You’ve got the crossword that you can do. It’s got all the features from the web and even more sit-back experiences — like we have the news in video and the news in pictures that can become full screen. I can navigate through this way. And then another interesting feature is this browse feature where it sits back and it says, let me navigate the content just by flicking through, and I can go from section to section and article to article, and then just jump right in.  So it’s a really interesting visual way of navigating this content.

Benton: What do you think — there’s so much inertia and momentum in the old, the traditional web browser, and that’s how most people get their news electronicaly now. What do you think it’s going to take to get people to move to something like this? To step out of the browser and have an Adobe AIR application, or have a dedicated device, or interact in a different way. What’s the tipping point?

Bilton: Well it’s, you know, if I constantly — I mean, look at Twitter. If I kept going to twitter.com, and it turned out that it was a much easier experience for me to download an AIR application or Tweetie or something like that and just have it running constantly on my desktop. So why couldn’t I have this experience? I still go to twitter.com sometimes, so this is just an alternate for that. And this is also looking at devices. This is all offline reading. This is, you know, if I want to put this on a tablet PC and read it on the subway, then I can do that and it formats and fits for that experience.

You know, I personally think that the browser — there’s too much going on on there. I mean, what buttons do you use other than the back button and to actually type in a URL? So it could be a full-screen experience, it could be a desktop application. There should be a blur between those lines I think.