THE NEWSPAPERS AS WE KNOW THEM - Will NYT, WSJ, Times, le Monde and Aftenposten survive the i-, Win- and other Pads?

The March 22, 2010 issue of the ever unafraid WIRED says it bluntly: The pad is the future, the laptop is dead. Not all of the "13 of the Brightest Tech Minds"* that "Sound Off on the Rise of the Tablet" proclaims the death of the laptop, but most of them do. January 29, 2010, I wrote a blog post The iPad and I here on Intermashonal, expressing much of the same sentiments. However, something Fake Steve Jobs, who is NOT CEO of Apple, says in his trashing of the New York Times in the mag, made me want to take the discussion a step further. Here's what he said:

"The iPad isn’t about saving newspapers. It’s about inventing new ways of telling stories, using a whole new language — one that we can’t even imagine right now.

(...)

Hacks, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to save you. Frankly, I don’t read magazines or newspapers, and if every last one of you were all erased from the planet tomorrow I would not notice and I would not care."

As I read Fake Steves ranting ("you pie-eyed crackhead"), I started to wonder if the assumptions I had made about the future of newspapers, was incorrect. Yes, Fake Steve is right, newspapers as we know them, may actually soon be gone. Not just gone in the sense of leaving the paper format, wandering off from paper onto pad, but gone. In a note to my above-mentioned post, I wrote "... as the news-paper draws its last breath". Should we just drop the (here:rhetorical) dash and consider the death of newspapers as such? You know, The Times, The Guardian, The Sun, le Monde, China Daily, Wall Street Journal? Or our very own Aftenposten, the only national newspaper of integrity left in Norway?

I have recently tried out several all-in-ones for PC. First there was iGoogle, but somehow it seemed clumsy, and the Facebook and Twitter part of it was too limited; I don't do Facebook or Twitter by phone, I hate small screens; I use glasses, all right? I tried TweetDeck for a while, but I didn't think it performed as I had hoped. HootSuite looks like som old pastel Win95-software, but has great performance, the shortening machine for URLs fast becoming a must for me. It takes Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Pages, MySpace, LinkEdin, Wordpress and others, it is superior on retweets, it even has stats.

But then I tried Treadsy. Not as sexy looking as TweetDeck, but very, very friendly. And I like that. I don't like no MS Dog to run around my Word documents, telling me what to do or suggesting lotsa stupid things when I'm late for a date, or have idiot pop-ups tell me I've got unused icons on my desktop. - YEAH, I'VE GOT UNUSED ICONS ON MY DESKTOP! SO?! YOU THINK I DON'T KNOW THAT?? GO **** THAT UGLY YELLOW DOG, YOU PRODUCTIVITY-HAMPERING MORONS! (Yeah, I still remember that one, never forgotten, never forgiven, grossly insulting! - OK, OK, I'll chill, it's a long time ago.)

Treadsy also takes all your cloud email accounts and places them beside your Twitter and Facebook newsfeeds. Now, mail is still an existing way of communication. The once so revolutionary email has, at least in the tech-savvy parts of the Western World, been killed by Facebook, MSN, Skype and others as the main means of digital communication on our spare time. However, it is very much alive and kicking within businesses and NGOs, and I still get newsletters and also messages from our beloved sluggish, even slothish authorities, who NOW, in 2010 are discussing the not so very avant-garde idea of "laptops for all Norwegian school kids" and are "offering" us mail connectability to all official bodies and municipalities in the country by maybe 20...12? Make it a pad, guys. Or you will **** yourselves.

What do I want? I'd like BBC World Service streamed as my wallpaper. I'd like Aftenposten streaming headlines and Breaking News, my Facebook and Twitter, I want my mail accounts, and I want all this to be fully operational, as if they were stand-alones or split-screens. I want it all, including subscriptions, RSS feeds on new posts on blogs I follow, I would like to be able to tag certain Twitterers ... I said all.

In short: a pad Version 2.0. I'm waiting for that special interface that can give me all-in one. What would I need a newspaper for then? Unless a newspaper was willing to give me an all-in-one interface, I would have no use for it.

Would I be willing to pay a vendor of newspapers, an agent, a syndicate? Maybe. But what if I wanted international news from the BBC, Norwegian news from Aftenposten, sports from my local paper Adresseavisen, selected comments from the Guardian?

The newspaper as we know it, used to be our portal to the world. But now, whether the newspaper will survive as such or not, I'm not ready to answer yet. However, I' sure that today's pad will become tomorrow's portal, and the newspaper as information icon will be just one voice among many. Of that I'm sure. And maybe they even will fuse with TV stations? The BBC-Guardian Network Alliance? Fox-Sun Media Network?

Of course, we could all be wrong. I predicted Apple's death in the mid-1990ies, so did WIRED. We were wrong. The real Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, did it again. But this time I think we are on the mark.

I never rooted for the laptop, that's just a gadget. But I am, however, rooting for the pad, because I share the revolutionary perspective of Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop per Child, first investor in WIRED:

"At a minimum, it needs to hold 100 books and wirelessly access any of the titles stored on nearby tablets. So, if you ship 100 of these to a remote African village, each loaded with 100 different books, that’s 10,000 books in the village — more than you and I had in primary school. I’m talking about the tablet version of the XO from One Laptop per Child, proposed for 2012. By that date, we will have moved from laptop to tablet ..."

So get me that all-in-one smuud interface on a sexy xPad, if you please. That Facebook-Twitter-Guardian-YouTube-browser-Skype-webcam-mail-BBC-New Scientist-eBook reader-Irish Archeology-Spotify-Blogger-Aftenposten-OpenOffice-Diablo3/DunePleasePlayable-cloudPhotoshop-Adresseavisen portal that without me asking, informs me of the new Dillinger Espace Plan album. It could be a portal, an installed software or an all-cloud application, call it what you like. The word software is rapidly disapperaring, anyway, into the sphere of cloud computing, murdered by apps.

A MyPortal with 20 pixel camera and video edit options, phone, great microspeakers and retractable, wireless headset, where everything is compatible with everything, no format excluded, and where QuickTime and other hate-objects are nowhere to be found. MYPortal, not yours. Will it go by the name of a newspaper? Of Aftenposten? Svenska Dagbladet? The BBC? Will there be several portals? Political portals? MyGreenPortal, including dietary tips? Will Apple develop it? A Chinese geek in Hongkong? Will it be just as badly programmed at the Facebook core?

And yes, I'll stick to my holographic screen and keyboard requirements, thank you. I want Avatar in my airport lounge.

*Martha Stewart is the only one that still insists on the survival of paper: "Ultimately, the tablet will not take the place, I hope, of the printed page in terms of the magazine format." But she is the sole luddite among the thirteen.