Free iPad, with newspaper subscription

In an tweet earlier today I asked: Would you pay $40 per month for your local newspaper… if it included a free iPad? (1 year contract.)

How much would you pay to subscribe to your local newspaper, if the newspaper through in an iPad for free? At $40 per month the 16GB WIFI version would be paid for within a year. The 3G version would cost about $53 for the same 1 year term.

An interesting concept for sure, but would it work? What are the ramifications to consider? Andrew Chavez asks “who pays for the data plan? Good point, if the newspaper paid the data plan they might be able to turn off the 3G signal if the subscriber defaults on payments.

It’s just an idea at this point, curious what other out there might think about the concept.…

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As Sean Blanda points out in his blog post, community (small) newspapers maybe left out of coming the e-reader (iPad) revolution. I would like to lead a team of news innovators in creating a iPad strategy for community newspapers.

The following is Sean’s “very, very basic outline” I agree on all but the last point, for the foreseeable future I don’t expect newspapers to incur any costs in this endeavor. That’s right free, as in “free beer.” The way I see it getting publishers to ACT is the hard part, followed by coming up with compelling ideas. The technology is really quite trivial nowadays, so by committing the technical resources, I’m getting off easy.

Step One: Publishers band together based on common interest. For example, local Web sites likely have similar interests in the functionality of their iPad and mobile applications.

Step Two: The publishers come to agreement on a list of common feature sets and what they envision an app looking like.

Step Three: Each publisher contributes a fraction of the total cost to hire a centralized development team (or just one developer) to maintain and focus exclusively on developing platforms with an emphasis on the Apple SDK.

So what are you waiting for, no time to loose right? Please leave a comment here with your intention to participate or email me at jboydston at gmail. Check back here often, I’ll update this page with additional info as we progress.…

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