Inside-baseball alert: nobody gives a shit about the arcana of Apple's terms of service agreements. Least of all newspaper hucksters. Except -- right, that whole future-of-news thing that we have to pretend to care about. So if you don't give a shit about this stuff, we don't blame you for skipping off to the next story about now. Did we mention Justin Bieber got a haircut?
But for those of us who are trying to carve out a living in the media this century, Apple is on our last fucking nerve.
Don't get us wrong: the iPhone is, by a country mile, the most transformative reporting tool since the invention of the pen. And we like your iMovie and iTunes, Mr. Jobs. Well played.
The iPad, though, pretty much ruined everything. For one thing, it conned the entire media industry into developing yet another platform for our stories -- on the assumption, not discouraged by Apple, that reading on a tablet would be such a revolutionarily awesome experience that readers, who had been abandoning print in droves, would suddenly have sex with us for money. We were going to look that good.
But things started going bad even before the iPad was released. Not only did Apple fail to unleash a new publishing paradigm to go with the tablet, it openly bitch-slapped the company that was furthest ahead in developing news-porn for the iPad. We asked for double-rainbows, and all we got was -- basically -- iBooks. If you wanted to hire developers to create a labor-intensive, time-consuming, not-particularly-interactive reading experience -- well, you were welcome to do that. And if you managed to get about a zillion people to buy it, Apple would reward you by deigning to let you sell their ads for them.
Most of us expected that, at launch, the iPad would come with an iTunes
for text -- and hopefully a new technical format that would support
things like, oh, multimedia windows or rescalable layouts or any of the other things that were supposed to make our text look so damn good on an iPad. Didn't happen. In some ways, the years-old experiment that magazines like the Fader used -- basically, they hijacked iTunes and delivered a .pdf as if it were a podcast -- is a superior delivery method compared with anything that Apple has officially rolled out.
Then, having forced news orgs to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars developing their own applications, each with its own proprietary publishing logic -- oh, and after also "accidentally" censoring some content along the way -- Apple realized that it had been very, very stupid. A newspaper app, it turns out, is different than Angry Birds. You don't want to buy a newspaper once -- for, say, a dollar -- and never pay for it again. So newspapers wound up giving their apps away for free, but selling subscriptions to content within the app. (For instance, that's how this douchebag's The Daily works.) See, Apple gets a 30-percent cut of app sales -- but it wasn't making any money on the subscriptions. By not producing a digital newsstand, Apple appeared to have opened a potentially billion-dollar loophole in its business model.
That loophole was slammed shut this month, as Apple announced its long-expected strategy for selling newspaper and magazine subscriptions -- and also announced that they'd be taking a third of the revenue. Furthermore, if you'd built something that sold subscriptions -- you can't do that anymore. Unless you also sell shit through Apple's store. At least, that's what everyone seems to think -- insanely, nobody's quite sure yet. It's not like the future of media's at stake or anything.
As they often do just when the media realizes how royally it's been fucked, Google stepped in at this juncture and offered -- maybe, eventually -- cheap paywalls for everybody! I'm not saying Google is to newspapers as crack dealer is to crackhead, but . . . maybe the needle exchange? I think Google is the needle exchange of news. Fucking evil bastards.
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