
Why Publishers Don't Like Apps - oliverdamian
http://www.technologyreview.com/business/40319/?p1=BI
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marcusf
What most people don't realize is the massive disconnect present in any
current newsroom. In one corner, there's the print staff, in another the web
staff. They work in separate systems, follow different workflows and are
treated like different P&L centers. Couple that with the very conservative
organizations that print papers are and you have a recipe for infighting and
'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy'-like power games.

There's currently a major push in the industry towards what's generally called
the 'convergent newsroom', bringing print and web together under one roof, so
you have a 'Sports' department that's in charge of sports regardless of
channel. The tablet has in many ways acted as an accelerator in this process,
in a roundabout way. When the tablet arrived, as the author noted, the print
people relished the opportunity to find a digital way to go back to olden
times. On the other hand, the web people saw it as a natural extension to the
website. So massive infighting will have occurred at most newsdesks around the
world. Since the print people have the most clout in most newsrooms around the
globe, they generally won the initial round, which pushed the print people
closer to digital. With the failure of early tablet papers (distributing
massive, perfectly kerned pdf's to devices), the web people have gotten a shot
at it, thus pushing the organizations closer to each other.

At the same time, the systems vendors, harrowed by the competition from open
source sees the convergent newsroom as the strategy to win; None of Wordpress,
Drupal etc can easily produce a website and a printed paper. The tablet has in
many ways been a spearhead in getting newspapers to look at buying new systems
and redesigning their organization around them, producing tablet, mobile, web
and print in one system. So every enterprise sales force in the industry is
out there pushing tablet systems like it's the second coming.

Newspapers aren't stupid, they're just (1) stuck in old organizational
structures, (2) using software that treats different channels as silos, and
(3) fraught with unionized contracts that make any change insanely difficult
(some contracts stipulate that the editors can only work in specific versions
of InDesign, for example). At the same time, they're very clearly on the
losing end of the digital disruption as the ad buy withers away from them with
nothing to replace it. No wonder they act like a deer in headlights.

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cageface
My strong intuition is that the era of apps as centers of profit themselves is
going to be short lived.

People are going to get tired of the gimmicky games. Content-oriented apps are
going to be easier to code as HTML5. Big companies like Facebook will probably
still find value in building native UIs but the number of apps actually making
money via sales in the app store is going to dwindle off.

~~~
manmal
Facebook ironically does not build real native apps, they are just beautiful
HTML wrappers. FB apps are an example of user experience regressions, as they
were by far snappier two years ago.

~~~
cageface
Yeah I'm aware of that but from what I hear they have native apps in the
works.

Of course, if even Facebook prefers to build HTML apps what are the odds that
smaller companies are going to go to the extra trouble and expense of native?

~~~
manmal
If you go the 80/20 route, you'll only need an iOS anyway, and later on you
can add an Android app - that's what they all do now, anyways. Perhaps that
will shift to Android-first when everybody and his dog has a cheap Android
phone (I hope not!).

Pseudo-native HTML apps are inferior, and people will notice it. I'm quite fed
up with the FB apps on both iOS and Android because they spend more time with
loading than the in-browser version. It's so bad that I actually considered if
FB wants to drive people away from mobile so they click more ads in the
browser - I don't think that's really the case though.

~~~
tomjen3
Will people notice it -- and leave the app? Or will a few geeks complain.

~~~
manmal
Ask Apple if paying attention to minute details (which the average user does
not mention) has paid off in the long term.

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ralfd
> But the real problem with apps was more profound. When people read news and
> features on electronic media, they expect stories to possess the linky-ness
> of the Web.

But why not simply embed a web view? I like to use the App "Alien blue" to
visit reddit.com. This sites purpose is to link outside and it works fine as
an app.

There is nothing wrong with apps, or even walled gardens, but the
implementations of digital magazines shortly after the iPad release was a
giant WTF: Glorified PDF Viewers, slow, non-hypertext-linky, non-zoomable,
non-Retina-ready, crashy, 500MB - 1 Gigabyte an issue.

~~~
officialchicken
You have to also "simply" embed a download/update mechanism, "simply" test
various restore scenarios (Consumable vs non-consumable receipts), "simply"
make sure it works in various orientations, and "simply" modify the way the
entire organization works to suit Apple.

The content is also different, taking a bunch of webdevs and telling them make
this work on iOS does not result in compelling content layout, design, or
navigation. There are subtleties in pinch&zoom, dragging, etc. that most
webdevs have not had the pleasure? of dealing with.

On top of that, UIWebView bridging js+objc is a PITA for iOS, and its a major
problem for android where the 2 solutions are not even close to similar. So
there is little code reuse between the viewers, and the content itself must be
slightly different for the 2 platforms.

~~~
Bxstraz
Yep, sounds like 'work' and these people don't 'work'.

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gdubs
Okay, couple of things here:

1) Just about every magazine app out there, that I've tried, is shit. I was
happy to pay for Wired, because I love Wired, but the app was terrible. 500MB
for a _mobile_ app, with 'interactive' features that belong on a 1990's
giveaway CD-ROM from RadioShack.

2) 19% of ALL tablet and smart-phone users paying for news apps in the past 30
days is still a LOT of paying customers.

Magazines are known to throw stupid amounts of money at things, yet when
presented with a new platform that could be the saving grace of their entire
industry they said, "The guys who make our web banners could whip something up
for us, right?"

It sounds like they're giving up without ever having really tried. And by
having tried, I mean developed something that really embraces the medium and
isn't just a dump from In-Design into some pre-fab 'app' engine.

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tomrod
I disagree, but only based on personal observation. Publishers clearly love
apps--hence the reason when I go to nearly any newspaper from the NYT to small
town USA news asks me to add their iPad apps.

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cmoscoso
tl;dr

publisher outsourced development and got garbage, puts the blame on "Apps"

lesson learned: Don't outsource your core business.

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Bxstraz
What a troll! The problem is we have pedantic editors that do not want the
text to flow fluidly. They want to control every extra dash like it is print.
They need to realize that to work on landscape/portrait mode, you have to
program the text to flow fluidly, you can't use 'screenshots of text'. Simple
fact: the publishers are stupid.

HTML5 works the same in an App's Web View as it does in Safari, so the lies at
the end of this article are particularly grating.

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joe_the_user
Wow,

This seems like a pretty big correction to claims the wall-gardens are going
to replace the Internet.

A single, free, multi-linked information space does seem inherently better
than a series of print reproductions.

