Before all the media hype surrounding the launch of the iPad in Germany starts again at the end of April – here they are: the 7 reasons why (even) the iPad will not save newspaper publishers:

1. The newspaper business model is passé.
   In the good old days, costs were split three ways: editorial, printing and distribution – and were recouped from three sources of income: cover price, display ads, classified ads. That world is a thing of the past. Although costs over the last 15 years have been kept within inflation, the fact remains that subscriptions and individual sales are declining, display ads are down due to market conditions and classified ads have been virtually annihilated by the Internet. None of these three illnesses will be cured by the iPad. Circulation will continue to fall because readers have less time for newspapers. Manufacturers and dealers are doing more and more business directly over the Internet instead of taking the roundabout route of advertising. And small ads will not be making a re-appearance on the iPad. (Hold on a minute: Has no German newspaper publisher ever made a serious attempt to imitate Craigslist?)
2. Newspaper newsrooms don’t know how to publish online.
   This has also been prevented for the last 15 years because of internal practices. 99.9 percent of German newspapers have separate newsrooms for print and online. Only where the American “newsroom concept” has been imitated at the Axel Spinger Blauer Group can media content be carefully controlled. Publishers continue to have difficulties not only with Internet content and business models but also with the technology Big difficulties in fact..
3. Online newsrooms don’t know how to do movies.
   Nobody in Axel Springer’s newsroom can do any of the following either: shoot, edit, add text to and illustrate an AV report, and prepare a table for good measure. This is how the perfect, beautiful new iPad news world would look, if we are to believe the first images we have been shown. But seriously – who is supposed to create this first truly multimedia content? And what will it all cost? OK, magazine editors at Wired and Vogue could do it with the aid of their editorial designer, perhaps even USA Today and the Wall Street Journal – but for the AZ to produce such a thing every day and as locally as possible – would it not merely consist of agency samplers or the amateur work of unpaid journalism students?
4. Users will also not want to pay on the iPad.
   Not for content they can continue to get on the Internet for free. And won’t the Internet also be on the Giant iPod Touch? Or will the iPad completely reverse Internet habits? Well, at least the content of the Süddeutsche Zeitung takes us back half a decade …
   
   Quick screenshot: sueddeutsche.de on the iPad
5. The reach of the iPad will be marginal.
   And so will its relevance for the advertising market. Advertisers buy GRP. They continue to do this according to the traditional patterns they have learned over 50 years of TV. This is where the greatest reach can still be found. Media agencies don’t really have the appetite for planning Internet campaigns, even though 67.2 percent of Germans can now be found online. And now they are expected to produce small multimedia works of art for a few hundred thousand iPad owners (who may just happen to be using, for a fee (!), the content offering on which they have published their advertising work of art)? And if they just do it for fun, then only with Augmented Reality. Unfortunately, the iPad doesn’t have the requisite camera.
6. 6. Apple’s business models always have a clear winner.
   And that is: Apple. Why is Apple “saving” the music industry? Because Steve Jobs enjoys singing in the bath? Maybe. But most of all to get 34 cents from a 99-cent piece of music. Why has Apple made it possible for so many small software companies to develop and distribute iPhone apps? Because Steve Jobs has a soft spot for developers? Sure, but also: to get his hands on 30% of their revenues. Why does Apple want to sell content and subscriptions from non-performing publishers on the iPad? … Right! (Hey: 30% … wasn’t that more or less what the publishers had to paid out for printing and paper back in the good old days?).
7. If I can’t do it, it can be done by force if necessary.
   A good sign of a dying industry is when it begins to call for its risks to be shared by the general public. As with carbon taxes. As with TV license fees, without which radio would be completely dead and TV as good as. The same thing is now being demanded by some publishers (see heise.de). In a nutshell, this is how Christoph Keese explains it on the Heise site: The compulsory levy should apply to the “20 million PCs used commercially in Germany.” Because: “For mobile platforms like the iPhone, publishers also rely on paid content”. German publishers are striking back with a double strategy: cash from the servile and wired PCs in the office by law, and from the oh-so free-thinking Macs via subscription. It will be interesting to see how high the sympathy factor is for the strategy in the freewheeling Apple Society.