iPad Working Group

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.