The hype, even for an Apple product, is getting ridiculous over what appears to be a bigger, longer flatter iPhone (that doesn’t make phone calls) and many are seeing it as a saviour of the ills of traditional press, but if you step back for a minute, look at what companies have done so far, you’ll see that it’s anything but the saviour of newspapers and magazines. If anything, journalists are in for a worse time once this comes out.

First off let’s remember that it’s only the Western World where print is having problems, so it’s not a global panic, but living in the Western World, it’s still enough of a concern to me that less people read newspapers and appear to digest news.

So many have embraced the idea that Apple’s new tablet will be the saviour. Why? Because they look at what the iPod did for music (hasn’t stopped music companies moaning has it? And remember, they hated the idea of the iTunes store – and some still do) and many of them like Apple as it’s been a company they’ve bought products from the past.

Here’s the problem: it doesn’t matter what the platform is, if you don’t have content providers giving you fresh, relevant material then people still won’t buy your product.

Print journalism for years has been seeing horrific cuts – with publishers filling the gaps with PA copy, agency copy, blatant lifts from the web – adding to the workload of those who stay behind (copy from most sources is always rewritten before it sees print) – and then there was the demand for online extra content – video, audio, tweets, blogs and so on.

To make matters worse, newspaper owners were going around buying websites that they thought would make them money  instead of investing in core product – content providers/news.

And now we have the iThingy, which is going to have more interlinked text, video, audio – all in a lovely format.

Here’s my question: who’s going to produce the material?

Here in Scotland, not one of the newspapers has a heavily manned web team. If a web editor in Scotland tells you he or she has more than a team of 10 they’re lying. Yet look at the likes of The Sun in London with more than 40 journalists doing web material.

So let’s look at two options here based on the following premise: Apple announce iThingy with an in-app payment system. You pay £5 for the app of a newspaper and then a monthly in-app subscription fee for the daily fresh content.

Option 1: Current staff have to produce more material, learn new tricks to help get text all iThingy friendly and take/edit more video (and most don’t edit their own video at the moment) – which is going to mean that the rate of productivity is going to go way down from perhaps 8 stories a day to 3. Which means more copy from the same sources as everyone else to fill the gaps. There’s also the issue of convincing journalists to actually do online/video work – many are still against it.

Option 2: Bring in new staff, able to gee-whizz code for this new shiny machine. Problem there is that they aren’t journalists, so while they can make it look nice, what are they going to make look nice?

The platform isn’t the problem, it’s that there’s not enough content providers been hired by the press to provide exclusive content. And don’t say that if the iThingy apps are a success more journalists will be hired. The history of journalism and profits show that the majority of profits go to the shareholders, not to improving the titles.

There’s another question: what’s the legality of using PA copy and so on?

The whole problem is that people buy newspapers for exclusives and by getting rid of the exclusive providers you effectively remove the reason for people to buy papers. And let’s not kid on that advertising works in a digital age.

There’s another issue too: does the new tablet really need video and audio? I read a newspaper for text. I like text. I can read text at work without getting into trouble. Most of the time I don’t need audio or video (but I’ll come back to this in another post).

I would love for nothing more than this tablet to be a huge success and lead to more journalists getting online, getting paid and reaching out to people – and for people to consume that news – but I think history shows otherwise.