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On Wednesday Amazon announced the newest version of it’s ebook reader, the Kindle DX. Taking the second generation’s improved design and increasing the screen size to 9.7” Amazon has targetted newspaper and textbook readers.

To complement this Amazon announced partnerships with the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe. Kindle owners can pay for subscriptions to the newspapers’ content, which is instantly and discretely downloaded to the device via an over-the-air network Amazon calls “Whispernet”.

Amazon also announced special deals with several University text book publishers and thousands of books, often weighing a considerable amount, will be available on the device which weighs just over 500g.

The problem is, for all the convenience and elegance of the device, it costs $500.  There’s very little economic incentive for students to adopt the device when they may only need $100 in text books, which are relatively easy to sell back when finished with. Newspaper readers can either pick up an inexpensive newspaper from a newstand/newsagent or in many cases access identical articles online, for free.

For the device to be a success Amazon needs to work on subsidy deals with content providers or academic institutions.  If the device cost $150 or £100 many people would be keen to pick one up and I think a subscription cost of around £10 a month for a newspaper is not a lot to ask, especially for ad-free quality content.

Undoubtedly, the price will come down as time goes by and component prices fall but it needs to happen sooner rather than later.  Rupert Murdoch yesterday called for an end to free online content from newspapers, and while he’s a hard character to warm to he makes a valid point.  Ad revenues for online content are just not enough, and are not a sustainable model for the newspaper business.  One doesn’t tear out the ads from a physical newspaper but it’s relatively easy to do that online with utlities such as AdBlock Plus for Firefox.

Quality journalism should be paid for.  The question is whether it’s too late for media outlets to start charging for their content, but a device like the Kindle could be just the device to change people’s ideas of how they access written news. Just make it cheaper, and available to the UK please Amazon.

Perhaps the editor of a newspaper that is haemorrhaging £100,000 a day isn’t the best person to listen to on the future of journalism but Alan Rusbridger raises some great points, and misses some.

It is inevitable that the traditional national and local media will contract.  We will see a large national player, possibly The Guardian, go under as the industry battles to try and find a way to make journalism pay.  There will certainly be many failed experiments before the right model is found.

The platform on which we consume content may be the way journalism is saved.  Ask people whether they would pay to access a news website and the overwhelming majority will say no, not that it’ll stop News Corp trying.  But offer people a convenient way to access content on a mobile device, such as an iPhone app or the Kindle e-book reader, and people are much more willing to pay for it.  They won’t pay 40p to £1 a day to access it but with the decreased overheads that a digital delivery platform provides, the newspapers won’t need to generate that.

Social Media & Citizen Journalism

Despite what many commentators say social media is not the future of journalism, but it will augment with traditional journalism to improve it.  Twitter is a great tool but it will never replace reading an article. We’d all have terribly uninformed views of events if we relied solely on eye witness accounts, the skill of the journalist is to find the story among the facts.  Something social media platforms can’t deliver.

Likewise too much is made of citizen journalism.  Citizens can report what they see and easily publish or upload their information but what they can’t offer is the big picture or context.  Citizen journalism provided a wealth of information, pictures, video and audio when the G20 protests and riots occurred, but it took experienced and trained journalists to analyse that information and assemble the big picture.

Hyperlocal Journalism

Hyperlocal websites are an idea that is really starting to catch on.  This is a focus on news within communities, limited to small areas such as a couple of postcodes.  This is largely done at a grassroots level and in competition with the traditional local media.

The benefits of hyperlocal journalism are smaller overheads, closer ties with the community and importantly much more targeted advertising.  A hyperlocal site may only need a handful of contributors, but if a site can get a readership in the tens of thousands in a very small area the targeted advertising opportunities for local businesses are great.

It’s a direct threat to traditional local journalism which people feel increasingly disconnected from.  A hyperlocal site can create content that engages much more with the community and can deliver it on a multimedia platform.  Your local area may only be mentioned on regional TV news once in a blue moon, yet it’s relatively inexpensive for the hyperlocal journalist to create community video news and distribute it online.

That ultimately is what the future of journalism needs, engagement with the readership or audience.  Specialist content delivered in bespoke ways to suit each person.  Traditional media will need to learn from the hyperlocal to forge stronger relationships with its audience.