Over the weekend my wife and I finally cancelled the Boston Globe subscription we’ve held, as loyalists, for years. Long overdue for a good cancellation, we got fed up with the all too frequent blast of music from the delivery guy at 5:30 AM, the occasional missed deliveries, and, to some degree, a thinner less substantive Globe then used to be. From now on we’ll use the iPad to consume the same content, and more, that we used to pay for (at least for the time being). And in theory it’s better for the environment.

Timely that two articles discuss the very topic of changing newspaper models. BostInnovation did a nice write up of new scenarios for the Globe as they shift (in face of a decreasing subscriber base) from free content online to dual sites, one with lightweight local news and one with premium paid content. BostInnovation sees the key being that users will pony up to pay for the premium content – those users that appreciate more detailed, quality reporting. So newspapers recognize that premium content is, well, premium. Yippee!

The second article came from the Times on the shift of media outlets as a “federation of individual brands” (in this case journalists). Again, the theme is premium content. Premium content, from the best writers, is what will drive people to a site. We’ve seen that locally, in just one example, as Scott Kirsner has migrated from being a Globe journalist to being an individual brand with the Innovation Economy blog.

But what really pulls it together, and in fact, may let the Globe start to rebuild by charging for their content, is the iPad. Having shifted our reading of the morning paper to the iPad, I have to say that – guess what – it’s pretty much, as an experience, just as good. Yes I miss the turning of pages and the grabbing a section to read in the morning. But, it’s all the same content and it looks fabulous on the iPad.

The Globe realizes that they have a falling number of subscribers. And the Globe gets that they have premium content that might be gotten by subscription only. And I hope the Globe gets that the notion of subscription is now palatable because of the experience on the iPad. Not on the web, but definitely on the iPad.

Is this going to be the revitalization of the newspaper industry because a) there are iPads and b) there is premium content? The two mix just fine, thank you very much. Bring on the subscriptions. I’ll pay for good content, all in one place.

“You’ve spent the day on the Internet, but not on the Web.”  Smart words from a smart guy: Chris Anderson from Wired (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1).  An amazing article that’s best read twice – he points out the obvious, but it’s worth pointing out.  The internet has evolved from the traditional web site.  The web is replaced by video streaming to Wii boxes running Netflix, by sharing between game platforms, and by (of course) apps.  And those end-points aren’t necessarily open; in fact, they are closed.  They are custom, closed experiences built just for the device in hand. And yet people vote for them in droves, because they provide specialized, tuned interfaces that are beautiful, and work just the way they should.

Much of that specialization is being driven by mobile.  As Anderson points out, the smaller footprint of mobile means that apps do smaller number of things better – specialized interfaces that do small numbers of things incredibly well.  But that specialization quickly leaps to a larger platform – the iPad – where it can be expanded to take advantage of the larger canvas.  The general purpose browser, great for search and email, gets supplanted by specialization.  Hence FlipBoard.  Hence the Elements.  Hence a lot of great iPad-specific apps.  And people will pay for them, as long as they are done well.

Apps do things better then the web.  Hence TweetDeck is a far better experience then Twitter home page.  FlipBoard is a far better experience then reading a blog.  And there’s a reason for that.  Web experiences are very two dimensional – you go up and down on the web page.  App experiences are multi-dimensional – you flip through pages (think FlipBoard), you rotate things (think Elements), you move things forward and back in time. It’s more natural, and more freeing, for the user, which makes for a far better experience.  Hence again, the triumph of the enclosed.

Yes, it takes a lot more special purpose programming, at least for now.  But so did the web initially.  The web required lots of special purpose programming, but 18 years into it, and its pretty easy to put together a HubSpot site or pay our man Shazzad in Bangladesh to put together a WordPress blog.  Early days.  Let’s see where we are in another 18 years.  And keep those apps coming in the meantime.

Fascinating analysis today from Trefis of the sales progress for iPad.  3MM sold.  10MM projected by years end.  30MM projected shortly after.  But what’s more interesting, at least to me, is that iPads are outselling MacBooks.  Outselling MacBooks.   Which means that people who would normally have brought a MacBook for personal computing are making a choice to go iPad.  Perhaps.

Or perhaps this means that Apple is further eating into Windows market share with the iPad?  Recent reports have Apple owning the high end laptop market (91% of laptops > $1000 are sold by Apple according to this article).  So if MacBook owns the $1000+ laptop market and iPad owns the $500 tablet market … where does that leave MS?

Either way, one thing that we can all conclude is that iPads are selling.  There are plenty of apps already, but plenty more will surely come to meet up with consumer demand.