WSJ and Others on the iPhone

Rupert Murdoch is apparently none too pleased that the valuable content of the Wall Street Journal is being given away for free on the WSJ’s iphone app, while it’s being charged for on the web.

In the free versus paid content wars, there is often a tone of moralism in the two sides: “set the content free” say the webby idealists; “you are all robbers” say the ink-stained dinos.

But it’s not a moral question; it’s a business question.

I don’t know the answers. But I do know this:

I am now a daily reader of WSJ because of their nice free iphone app. I used to read maybe one article a month from WSJ, if that, linked to from someone or other. But with the iphone app I am now a serious daily reader of theirs. I suppose I won’t continue to read WSJ if i have to pay for it, though I do have the sense that with reasonable prices I might be willing to pay for news content on the iphone, even if i would never consider doing so on the web.

My experience of reading news on iphone is totally different than reading on the web: when I’m on my laptop I flit from place to place, to email, to Boing Boing, to Google Reader, to work I am supposed to be doing. I rarely finish articles, and I would never consider “going to the New York Times” to find my news. It’s flowing around me all the time.

On the iphone, however, I read much like i would a newspaper … going through the whole thing, not reading all articles, but scanning all the headlines, and reading a number of stories from different sections. I often do this in bed, first thing in the morning, or before bed. Often, when a bout of insomnia hits, that’s what I do.

I think this is a fascinating shift in my content consumption … back to an older, more focused kind of reading. My laptop is like a chaotic sea of info swishing around me on my prime working machine, from which I grab the odd morsel here and there; it’s a reading machine on which I ought to be writing.

But the iphone is different, I use it almost exclusively as a reading machine, with the odd bit of writing, a twitter post here, an urgent email there. And that is its power, why I think it is so successful. It allows us to focus on content in a way that a laptop doesn’t.

And interestingly, I think it means that there is much more room for payed content on the iphone, where there isn’t on the web. Attention on the web, don’t forget, is driven by links. If you don’t have links, you don’t get love. And if you’re behind a paywall, you don’t get links.

That all changes on the iphone, where attention is defined by the apps. And content feels like it has real value again.

Maybe things will change as more read/write apps get introduced into the iPhone, but for now I am convinced that mobile is not just “more mobile” but that it brings a sea change, and a ray of hope, for all those publishers who want to keep getting paid.

For the record:
Bloomberg, WSJ, NYT, Canada’s Globe and Mail all have pretty good iphone apps. [Where is the Guardian UK I wonder?].

Bloomberg is the best app, in my opinion, because it is the simplest & least buggy, and doesn’t waste time & processing power on photos.