iPhone 3GS: advantages for newspapers, advertisers, and citizen journalists

One iPhone application, a reader called Iceberg developed by the start-up ScrollMotion Inc., will take advantage of the new technology to offer over 170 daily newspaper titles on a paid basis, according to their website. Iceberg, which currently offers 500 best selling books and competes with the Kindle app, has expanded their content partnerships for the new OS to offer newspapers from The Tribune Company, and 50 major magazines from publishers including Hearst Publications and Conde Nast. It is unclear whether this means The Tribune will be charging for access to their content, however they will most certainly have the capacity to do so already programmed into the Iceberg app. Has the time come for the Tribune's competitors to follow suit and begin partnering with or developing applications to charge their iPhone-using audience?

Ryan Tate, of Gawker.com, wonders whether newspapers might band together to create a single application allowing for access to numerous titles, much like the TV studios did with the video-sharing site HULU. The primary difference, however, would be the likelihood that these papers will charge for access to their content, either through subscriptions plans or micro-payments. One potential obstacle in pursuing this mega-app for newspapers, would be to avoid infringing on anti-trust laws, which have very strong regulations on competitors colluding to set prices. This issue has already arisen at the recent Chicago news executives' meeting, where anti-trust lawyers were present to make sure the topic of pricing was entirely avoided.

Whether a new app emerges that offers paid access to multiple titles across the newspaper industry or not, another addition announced for the iPhone's newest OS "is going to give publishers the technology to redefine publishing news and advertising delivery," said Art Howe, CEO of Verve Wireless. Howe is referring to the iPhone's new ability to deliver user-location information at the browser level, meaning a newspaper website, and its advertisers, can now target an individual reader with stories and ads relevant to within a two block radius, as describes Jennifer Saba, a senior editor at Editor & Publisher. "This makes local advertising on mobile highly potent with high CPMS," Howe said, a development that has to potential to significantly boost the ad revenue of those newspapers who integrate the new technology into their iPhone apps. Will this potential ad revenue boost be sufficient to prolong some publishers from charging for online content? Or, will newspapers seize this opportunity to compound the effects of better targeted advertising with paid-for online content to multiply their profits in the mobile media arena?

A third technological development included in the iPhone 3GS allows for the recording of video through the back-mounted camera. This function has long been available through applications outside the App store, such as DrunknBass Video Recorder, which emerged as a beta application in December of 2007.  However, the new Apple approved video recording captures images at 30 fps and also gives users the added option of posting their videos directly to YouTube, a function which Brian Stelter of the New York Times points out as a major development for citizen journalists everywhere. "The possibilities for on-the-scene videos of breaking news are profound", he says today in his posting on the Media Decoder blog. Rachel Sterne, the founder and chief executive of the citizen journalism site GroundReport explains that "most people are still learning how to independently document news events, and there's a learning curve...This [iPhone-to-YouTube function] will support citizen journalism efforts because it trains laymen to be reporters." She posits that the future of citizen journalism lies in the hands of the mobile phone user. Although some other smart phones already boast the mobile-to-YouTube uploading capacity, it will be interesting to note whether the new function for the iPhone, the mobile device most used to access the web, will indeed significantly expand citizen journalism.

The new features and improved functionality of the iPhone 3GS certainly present interesting new opportunities for the newspaper and advertising industries, as well as citizen journalism. However, given the iPhone's numerous competitors, including the just released Palm Pre, any considerable changes, such as charging for online content, will surely have to be made across mobile platforms; a complication which is likely to delay their execution considerably.

Source: Editor & Publisher, Gawker,  Mediabistro, New York Times