The Future of Publishing

While the news out of the news business recently has mostly been more of the gloomy same-staff layoffs, cutbacks in coverage, and “doing more with less”- two publishing giants, Hearst and Time Inc., unveiled their own upbeat looks at the future this week.

Hearst, whose stable of publications includes the online Seattlepi.com, disclosed new details about its FirstPaper project, which has been mostly under wraps up to now. It includes a new e-reader with an accompanying e-reader content service and a new name-Skiff.

Unlike Amazon’s Kindle, which has been focused on the book market and now accounts for nearly half Amazon’s book sales, Hearst says Skiff’s primary audience will be newspaper and magazine readers, although like the Kindle it will also offer books. “Skiff will offer publishers a way to participate across the full value chain,” promises the company’s president, Gil Fuchsberg.

Meanwhile, MinOnline, a trade blog that covers the media, says Time Inc. stalwart Sports Illustrated has begun showing off a touch-screen version of what the magazine will look like in the not-so-distant future. And it is a dazzler.

Tablet-sized, loaded with color and graphics, including video, the web-oriented SI of the future promises a living cover-a rusher busting through the line and into the end zone in the promo video-plus ads that jump out of the copy to make their pitch and interactivity that allows users to plug in their own fantasy leagues to reams of real-time data. Wonderfactory, Time Warner’s New York-based tech partner on the project, developed the demo SI to fit on a variety of screen sizes, from iPhones to Amazon’s Kindle and the spate of more sophisticated e-readers set to debut early next year.

In fact, if SI and Wonderfactory come anywhere near producing an online magazine like their demo, Kindle and its ilk could be left trundling along behind the newer e-readers. But that won’t be easy. The current generation of e-readers can get color and live streaming video, but to do it they must sacrifice battery life. Right now, the latest Kindle version lasts for about a week between battery charges. It downloads, then shuts down until the next download to save the battery. Color is expected to be at least a year off, industry experts say. Achieving SI’s sophisticated color graphics and streaming video would be a problem.

Not to worry, says SI‘s illustrated group editor Terry McDonell. “We wanted to anticipate the coming upgrades with technology beyond the Kindle,” McDonell told MinOnline. Nobody is talking about cost yet.

Still, both Skiff and SI‘s new demo are yet another step propelling the news business away from print, toward the digital age. As Seattle Business reported in October there is a proliferation of touchscreen e-readers due early next year, including Hearst’s and Plastic Logic’s touchscreen Que, which has newspaper giant Gannett and its flagship USA Today on board. It’s all part of the industry’s effort to cut back on print’s expensive overhead and slap paywalls around their news websites, the better to drive new users to their electronic readers. First up is Rupert Murdoch, who is reportedly in talks to move his News Corp. properties, including The Wall Street Journal, from Google’s aggregation machine to Microsoft’s Bing search site, and which will charge for access to the content.

As they say in the news biz-more tk.