Stop the Presses: Breathing New Life into the News

So Steve Jobs has come down from the mountain and presented the world with the Apple tablet and the world literally is a-twitter. The iPad, it’s said, is going to change the world the way iPods changed mobile entertainment, iPhones changed mobile phones and iTunes changed music.

Anyway, the earliest glowing reports state that the iPad is the most amazing tablet since Moses carried a pair down from a mountain with a few societal rules. The thing I thought was most interesting — not compelling, you understand, interesting — was early talk that the iPad would save newspapers.

Apparently people who don’t like to pick up that bulky old collection of newsprint won’t mind sitting on the morning train with an iPad warming their lap and breezing through the sports section. Apparently.

When you think about it, newspapers, so obviously a low-tech information conveyance, are logically a top application for high-tech gear. Newspapers, after all, were the original interactive devices. A reporter would write a story; a reader would call the editor and demand the reporter be fired; an editor, depending on the kind of day he was having and whether his liquor supply was in order, would comply with the demand or, more likely, tell the caller to write a letter to the editor. The letter would appear in a later edition. It doesn’t get more interactive than that.

Newspapers, though, have been supplanted by television because people apparently don’t want to make the effort to sit down and read through all the pages. I’m not sure that any kind of handheld device, even one as marvelous as the iPad, will solve that. People are just more willing to have their news read to them.

Newspapers have dabbled in video on the web, but the best way for them to fight television is to create a video experience of their own. Make the Daily Bugle interactive with its own listing or video-rich iPad app. Push a button, and learn who’s died, who’s been born, who’s getting married and which one of your neighbors is in jail because those tomatoes he was growing weren’t really tomatoes. That’s the kind of information that will never make the evening TV news.

Today’s newspapers have all the tools to be truly interactive with any connected device. Their staffs shoot video as often as still photos; stories are continually updated throughout the day; they all have Web sites; and some of the more advanced ones will actually read the stories to you so you feel like you’re watching the evening news — only with more depth and accuracy.

I’m thinking that maybe newspapers aren’t as dead as we’ve been led to believe. While the iPad focus has been on reviving “print,” I’m thinking that a rich, interactive video experience can bring new life to the medium.

Television news started with anchors unapologetically reading their on-air stories from the newspaper. Interactivity can revive that trend in a positive way for newspapers. Get the headlines from the traditional TV news sources, but when you want the real story only community journalism can provide, tap into the Bugle News site on television — or your iPad.