The Newspaper’s Savior?

As he unveiled Apple’s new tablet computer before an adoring throng in San Francisco this morning, Steve Jobs could hardly contain himself. “It’s phenomenal to hold the Internet in your hands,” Jobs said, waving the 9.7-inch e-reader, the iPad, which Apple plans to sell for $499 and up, beginning in March.

Jobs’ enthusiasm is certainly understandable. Apple is betting heavily it will steal the thunder from Amazon’s wildly successful Kindle e-reader and the host of other e-readers crowding into the arena (although Amazon is already reportedly at work on yet another version the Kindle that will likely incorporate some of the iPad’s features, like a touchscreen and color display.)

But what Jobs was really holding in his hand today was a newspaper-a scaled-down, digital, back-to-the-future version of the old broadsheet-and perhaps the newspaper industry’s last shot at reviving the staggering cash cow that, not too long ago, supplied publishers with profit margins that would make most businesses blush with envy. A bevy of New York Times executives turned out as a backup chorus for the Jobs show today. “It’s everything you love about the paper,” Jennifer Brook, a Times “information architect,” declared of the iPad. It will, predicted Brook, be “everything you love about the web and everything you expect from the Times.”

Sadly, what most readers have come to expect from their local paper these days is a “less is less” version, in the words of Seattle Times Executive Editor Dave Boardman-less local coverage, less depth, less of just about everything, except price. Apple’s iPad, ten years in the making, may change that. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and a host of other newspaper heavies plan to erect pay walls around their news websites this year, a move some industry pundits have derided as certain to drive readers and advertisers away from those sites. They’ve got it backwards-the pay walls will, of course, cut down on website readership, but more important they will drive readers, old and new, toward devices like the iPad, Kindle and Hearst’s forthcoming Skiff. (Barnes and Noble’s Nook e-reader got a series of negative reviews and critics said it was rushed to market before it was ready.)

Hearst is already on board in Seattle with this revenue model-it eliminated its costly and unprofitable paper edition of the P-I last March and has announced it will launch its Skiff e-reader and information service this year. The Seattle Times insists it will hold on to its ink-on-paper paper, but the Times is still reeling (just today, Times union staffers will vote whether to cede future pension-fund contributions from their employer, a move the Times Co. says it must have to survive) and the prospects for continued seven-day publication of the paper are dim.

The Seattle Times won’t disclose its plans to join the e-reader herd and Hearst has been vague about a startup date for Skiff-perhaps waiting to see what Apple had in its hand. But here is a prediction: Soon, maybe even later this year, Seattle’s two major news operations-the Seattle Times and Hearst’s P-I-will once more be slugging it out toe-to-toe, ending the dormancy that began when Hearst reduced the P-I to a web holding action. Only this time the fight will move to e-readers, and if the Times‘ owners elect to mothball their four big (and expensive) presses, some of that old-time newspaper spunk, and profit, may once again return to the local news business.