5Spot

Inevitably, many consumers will buy subscriptions through Apple. That’s a good thing – and a lead list for newspaper companies. Let Apple sign up new subscribers, happily providing the 30% commission. Even if the publisher doesn’t get much customer data (about 50% are withholding it, given the Apple-offered opportunity to opt out), the publisher retains an enviable relationship to that reader. It’s called the daily product. Each day, readers get the news products, and they can receive “all-access” offers. To Rob Grimshaw’s point, these offers don’t need to be seen as anti-Apple offers. They simply offer readers more choice, and who could argue with that?

For anyone following Murdoch’s long-standing campaign against the BBC, and its public funding — a campaign now having an effect as Britain suffers through terrible economic times — Fox’s drumbeat of anti-NPR coverage is no surprise. Public radio, and public media, are a counterweight to Fox; Murdoch and Fox News head Roger Ailes, like nothing better than throwing them off balance at every opportunity.

It comes down to something old-fashioned: News judgment. MPR had the same access to NPR’s feed of the press conference as other stations, I’d presume. Yet, it was the only I found (perhaps there were others) that handled the news best and largely smoothly (I even enjoyed the French lessons for a few moments) in the interests of its listeners. That took some planning, thinking and moving on the fly — and isn’t that what we in the news business are supposed to excel at?

Internet TV is no longer in its infancy; it’s toddlin’. Yet our human capacity for change, and our expectation of it, may always be a step ahead. As consumers, we expect all these connections to be made, and yesterday. Given the pace of tech change, that’s not totally unreasonable. For those producing content — music, video or news — though, it’s a big headache. Yesterday’s solution simply is like yesterday’s news: Old, and in the way.

The desktop web has been the ultimate YellowPages/weather update/news check-in/bar bet paradise. Remember back to the ’90s, when we discovered we could go anywhere. It was liberating and mind-blowing. Now, perhaps comforted that the short-read, information-access medium will always be there (and on and through the tablet as well), we’re taking to a new opportunity, the opportunity to read digitally, in ways we find lean-back pleasurable.

Now with the prediction that as many as 50 million in the next two years, according to yesterday’s EMarketer report, it’s clear we’ve got a new path. Have an unprofitable, or barely profitable print product. Bag it, and go to the iPa

Google atomized content in one way, blowing up the newspaper (and magazine) package, and presented it in bits. Now we’re starting to see ways — Kindle Singles, I think, is best vision of what can now be done (“The Newsonomics of Kindle Singles”) — to reassemble those bits every which way in ways that make consumer sense. Moreover, they may well offer new consumer propositions and business models as well.

Logitech’s new controller look like iPad. It’s a metaphor of 2010. Remember when the iPad came out, and people derided it as a big phone….which wasn’t a phone, an in-between. The design look-a-likes could be a design fad. Most likely, though, they are the beginning of a re-imagining of how we interact with the digital air.

Big is better. Ideas are great, but capital means the ability to acquire, to build and to sustain a business through harder times.

For newspaper companies, believing they have time to wait and see and wait and see some more, before launching tablet products, today’s announcement is another warning sign. Early tablet adopters will win early audiences — and it will be hard to take those audiences away with lesser products. As importantly, we’re seeing two companies on the move — personality- and video-heavy Comcast and a reborn, digital-first Sporting News combining efforts. In the process, they are redefining local.

It’s happening in sports. Expect it to happen in local news, in business and in lifestyle and entertainment categories of all kinds. 2011 is beginning now.