Apple iPad: All the news that's unfit to print

“Honey, I shrunk Steve Jobs – but his iPhone stayed the same size.” Its detractors may have hit back against the hype, as Ben Hughes of the St Martin’s school of design suggests in this edition of The Journal, but possibilities suggested by the iPad are only now becoming clear.

Consumers have never before gotten their hands on a device with an unarticulated high-quality, colour touch screen display of a similar size to the iPad. It might not be useful for word processing or extensive web browsing, but for media consumption the iPad is ideal: small, but perfectly formed.

Apple executives may dream of planes and trains full of travellers watching YouTube videos, movies and TV shows to pass long journeys. Certainly, it may provide the fillip to Apple’s unloved AppleTV service, which never took off the way iTunes did – partly because it didn’t have symbiotic relationship with a tailor-made platform, the way iTunes did with the iPod.

The area in which the iPad has revolutionary potential, however, is periodical publishing. Newspapers and magazines all over the world are under threat of extinction, squeezed from both sides by falling circulations and declining advertising revenues. British print media institutions have all had to institute painful redundancies; the situation is yet more stark in America, where only a last-ditch budget concession from employees’ unions saved one of the nation’s biggest dailies, the Boston Globe, from failure. Readers, it seems, have fallen out of love with the newspaper – bulky, expensive and impractical, as a format it cannot compete with the internet.

But Apple may have thrown the industry a lifeline. In his demonstration of the iPad, Mr Jobs browsed a digital edition of the New York Times rendered almost exactly like its print analogue - turning the pages with the swipe of the hand that has become the codified sign language of iPhone users. On a mobile device that can offer a quality experience almost akin to reading a print edition, the utility—and the very concept of reading a newspaper—is given a new lease of life.

Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian’s editor-in-chief, has called for “an iTunes for newspapers” to run alongside the iPad. If print media industry leaders get behind such an initiative, users could download dozens of publications—whose physical volume would fill a suitcase—as they would appear on newsstands, all on a tablet-sized piece of hardware.

To make this development possible requires one of the world’s most forward-looking brands to join forces with one of the most outdated media formats. Apple must allow Adobe Flash software to be supported on the iPad, so that newspapers and magazines can entice advertisers back into their pages – but digitally, with video adverts where print publications only carry static images. For their part, media organisations such as Rupert Murdoch’s News International must abandon their wrongheaded fixation with pay-walls in online content, as Mr Rusbridger has called for. Mr Jobs has left ajar the door to a pocket-sized ‘freedom of the press’ of the truest sense – for their own survival, the media moguls must push it open.