Times Saver

I love the new iPad. If you're one of the four or five people in America who missed the news about Apple's latest device yesterday afternoon, stop reading this blog and visit Apple's website immediately and check it out. As CEO Steve Jobs revealed yesterday, the new iPad is kind of like a scaled-up iPod Touch, or an over-sized iPhone without the phone. It will allow you to surf the web, catch up on e-mail, play music (and music videos), watch movies and television, and read books -- all on a full-color, 10-inch touch screen. It's thin and light and, like everything Apple, stylish.

But what caught my eye when I looked at the pictures of the iPad on the Apple site this morning were the images on the device's touch screen: they were pages from the New York Times! The iPad, I thought, could be "it." The Holy Grail. The device that finally allows old media, like my beloved New York Times, to fully embrace the electronic age.

I first encountered the Times when I was a freshman in college. Hard to believe now, but back in the late 1960s, people in Allentown, Pennsylvania were largely unfamiliar with America's finest newspaper. We had The Morning Call and the Evening Chronicle, and I'm sure a few of our neighbors subscribed to the Philadelphia Inquirer to get hometown sports coverage of the Phillies or the Eagles. But the New York Times? It might as well have been the Times of London.

So finding a copy of the Times on a coffee-stained table in Wesleyan's Downey House was a revelation. Front-line stories from Southeast Asia by great reporters like Sy Hersh, Harrison Salisbury, David Halberstam and Johnny Apple, and dispatches from the Civil Rights movement by the likes of Tom Wicker, Tony Lewis, and Roy Reed were eye-openers to me in 1967. The Op-Ed page, which first appeared in 1970 -- at the height of the Vietnam War -- has launched a million arguments and thoughtful conversations.

These many years later, the Times is still arriving on my doorstep every morning. But readers like me are a dying breed, as circulation numbers for virtually every print daily decline and laptops replace newspapers at America's breakfast tables. Like most papers, unfortunately, the Times got hoodwinked by the "information wants to be free" mantra of the early Internet and posted its content online free of charge, only to find that giving away expensively-produced journalism was not necessarily a sustainable business model. With advertising revenue heading south, can the Times survive?

Recently, publisher Arthur Sulzberger and the Times executive team announced their intention to create a new "pay per view" business model for the publication's online website. The details haven't been worked out yet, but it's said that the new plan will allow readers to access a limited amount of content for free, then charge heavy users for access beyond a minimum threshold. Well, good for them. I have no idea how this will work, but I know that if the Times doesn't find a way to generate revenue from the product it produces, it will, one day, cease to exist. (Which in my view, would kill intelligent life in our country as surely as an asteroid strike).

But monetizing content is only part of the problem. Everyone reading this blog knows that information-consumers aren't waiting for the news to arrive on their doorsteps anymore. Instead, we access information on a regular basis from the web, round the clock, on our computers and our smart phones. (See previous post: "TMI?"). Traditional newspapers, then, need a new delivery system. Laptops are fine, but they aren't practical for reading the news on public transportation, or while sitting in a comfortable easy chair. And smart phones are wonderfully portable, but reading anything more than a short article is tough on the thumbs.

And that's where the new iPad comes in. This is the first device I've seen that looks like a perfect substitute for the traditional newspaper. Based on the photos on Apple's website, the Times will be able to display something similar to a front page on the iPad, giving readers the same expansive menu of possibilities they enjoy when they read the Times in print. But unlike the print edition, the iPad version will allow readers to click on slide shows and interactive features -- things they now enjoy only online. The iPad also has the Goldilocks quality of being "just right." It's not as big and clunky as a laptop, or as small as a smart phone, and it should fit nicely in a shoulder bag, a briefcase or a backpack. As a newspaper reading device, it should work fine at the breakfast table, on the subway, at a desk or in a comfortable chair.

I don't know if the iPad will end up saving The New York Times. But if it does, Arthur Sulzberger should send a case of very fine champagne to Steve Jobs.