Apple iPad & New Media: from Time Magazine

Some really interesting writing from Time Magazine lately about the iPad, it's potential impact and the related area of journalism and new media.

To the iPad itself, the April 12 issue gave us a cover image of Steve Jobs and mention of two stories within the pages (but, more later on this idea of "pages").



First was "The iPad Launch: Can Steve Jobs Do It Again?", a fanboy piece penned by novelist and screenwriter Stephen Fry and second was "Do We Need the iPad? A TIME Review" by Lev Grossman.

Grossman wrote a number of nice things about the iPad, but also noted that it's usage appears to be "lovely for consuming content, but not creating it"... which echoed what I've seen from writers such as Jeff Jarvis in his BuzzMachine post "iPad danger: app v. web, consumer v. creator."

Fry's essay takes a very different approach in that he writes of his visit to Apple headquarters to speak with Jobs and his lieutenants responsible for running various facets of company business. While not having anything that would contradict the idea of the iPad as being for content consumption, Fry presents a compelling vision of it being an elegant and personal device for it's intended purpose... allowing users an immersive user-friendly experience with the things they want to access on a computer (including, but not limited to: music, videos, pictures, games, books and websites).

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While the iPad itself is simply a device, the Editor's Letter from this April 12 issue gave a glimpse of at least the potential for it to change markets (in this case the field of Journalism). In "Ushering in a New Era", Richard Stengel writes of Time's efforts to get a version of the magazine available for the iPad.

In the same category of "Journalism: Where it's Been, Where it's Going" was an essay by Alan Brinkley from the April 19 issue of Time. "What Would Henry Luce Make of the Digital Age?" covered the co-founder and former head of Time Inc. and addressed how he might have approached the current business climate and rush to digital facing print media.

What media should do doesn't have an easy answer, but is a fascinating topic. In February of last year I linked to and wrote about the Walter Isaacson Time cover story "How to Save Your Newspaper" and also find interesting (and encouraging) people like the aforementioned Jeff Jarvis and his BuzzMachine blog (and teaching around Interactive/Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York Journalism School).

No way to tell where things with media will wind up, but ranging from the guys writing about and working on it to the new products coming up in the space (even if they're designed more for content consumption than creation), there's a lot of interesting stuff going on around this field of new media and user experience with media new and old.

Social Media Blog Posts

Earlier this week I did a post that listed out the business topics most frequently covered in this blog... and which tackled the blog topic area of touch-screen technology. For the purpose of this post, I want to start looking at another large business topic... that of Social Media.

The area deserves attention it's become ubiquitous from a person to person communication perspective through mediums like blogs, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook among others. Arguably even more important, though, is the corporate perspective as companies attempt to use many of these same channels to reach consumers.


From either approach, Social Media is a big deal that I've written about and linked to quite a bit here. With this post I want to bring together some of those posts and links...


Books & Associated Content

Back in Sept 2008 I did a post titled "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good" by Sarah Lacy which was about... yep, Sarah Lacy's book on Web 2.0 companies. It was an interesting read in that the book looks at the newest web entries with particular focus on platform companies such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. The post above also links to a BusinessWeek excerpt from the Lacy book which focuses on the platform company Ning.

In Feb 2009 I did a blog post linking to another BusinessWeek excerpt... this time from the Jeff Jarvis book "What Would Google Do?" As to the book itself, I found it an extremely interesting read and wrote a review of it here. While it's true that the book isn't about Social Media, Jarvis is a prolific writer on web topics (often via his website BuzzMachine) and his writing deserves mention in any discussion of web or "new internet" stuff.

The last "Social Media as a topic" book I posted on was "Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters" by Scott Rosenberg which I reviewed here. An excellent book which looks at blogs and their import... as both an ongoing medium and the precursor of other Social Media mediums like Facebook and MySpace (among others).


Magazine Pieces

The most in-depth Social Media magazine writing referenced in this blog was probably in a June 2009 post titled All Around the Social Networking Mulberry Bush. Linked to within was a Time Magazine cover story on Twitter and BusinessWeek cover story about online relationships.

Also deserving of mention here, though, are three additional blog posts done. The first was an Apr 2009 post which referenced the Jarvis book along with the concept of the how relatively easy it is to launch an internet company today. The other two posts had various and sundry articles on Social Media companies and concepts linked... with the first including Facebook and LinkedIn and the second Amazon, Facebook and mobile commerce.

Lots of writing out there about a big topic... which will only get more important as both person to person and company to consumer communication moves forward. Fun times for those who understand and work in this area.