Poynter Forums

Although I am looking forward to owning a tablet PC someday (provided it works sufficiently well and is not price-prohibitive), to say that digital publications will be on equal footing with printed ones is ridiculous. Can we at least give it a couple of years to see how things play out? Have we not learned anything in recent years about propagating false expectations? (Yes, you can access the Internet on the go, but don't forget about such restrictions as batteries, electrical cords, and WIFI signals). No matter how great an invention this device might be, it still has to fit into the 24-hour days of busy consumers with tight budgets. Are consumers really looking for more ways to experience information? How well have electronic book readers (Softbook and RocketBook) faired to date? Perhaps a high-price tag for the hardware readers hurt adoption, and perhaps there might be a similar obstacle for tablets (no matter how great the improvements of the display). HDTV also has a pretty good display, and how has that platform done historically? (Yes, a different price-category and device, but they have a similar catch-22 problem pertaining to programming and market penetration. Even if "publishing" to tablets is not difficult, publishers will still need economic incentive to invest in new forms of content and services).

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"Threat: when tablets are commonplace, pure online/digital publications will be competing directly with powerful and well-funded traditional publications, which will port their content to digital tablet form. That will be tough for pure digital publications."
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How is this any different than competing on the web??? Are you implying that "big powerful traditional publications" have not found their way onto the web, yet? And thus the web is less competitive? And if they have not leveraged the web (a channel with a huge global audience), why would they jump onto to this particular platform so quickly?

The biggest threat by far is an industry suffering from free commodity products and services in a world of ever expanding substitutable choices. The industry continues to do little to communicate and leverage what is truly most valuable about digital content as compared to other channels.

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"Kinsley says the way for the likes of Slate to compete is to stay one step ahead technologically of traditional periodical publishers — creating new, innovative forms of digital content presentation."
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They way for the likes of Slate to compete is to have a rich and powerful parent (e.g. an indulgent parent that emotionally does not mind a prestigious loss leader a la the New Yorker). This is yet another blanket statement that technology will magically give a company competitive advantage. This is similar to reports stating that people will pay for content and services on wireless devices. All it will take is a few strong competitors (e.g. Yahoo!, MSN, AOL) offering free services to hurt the efforts of others. (By the way, I am still waiting for the protests about charging for wireless content and/or access).

Instead of "creating new, innovative forms of digital content presentation" the industry should work on creating new innovative forms of digital content profits. Isn’t there anything we can learn and apply from the computer, movie, and music industries???

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You know, Slate's not even available on PDAs yet. Maybe he's not the guy to ask.