Tis is a guest blog post written by Omer Rosenbaum.

This week we in Sweden joined the Ipadmania when exactly on Tuesday night at 00:01 Media Markt had started to selling it. And although it wasn’t sold by thousands it is still holding one of the biggest revolutions that local newspapers media will go in the next 3 years. We are about to change the way we read newspapers and from now on it will be depending on time of the day and place. According to this prognosis by 2015 newspapers could be even more profitable than today if they would only be fast
enough to adjust to the new realm.

One of Sweden’s biggest newspapers is already there. Dagens Nyheter (DN) had launched Ipad application for its newspaper and charging for access to its content. The price is higher than the ordinary newspaper even though there are no distribution and printing costs. But I will get to that later.

So based on DN’s triple platforms here is how Swedish newspaper journalism will might look in the coming 3 to 5 years.

Newspapers – as selling figures continue to decline it will come to a point when it’s not profitable to print it anymore. On the other hand raising its price in order to at least cover the costs is not a solution because the internet is offering the same content for free, or nearly free. As for the content it will be more of short articles and many “read more on our website” and “download our Ipad application and read the
rest”. And it will be much slimmer than we think, something like high-quality Metro. Its life expectancy will be extremely short as people will read it on the way to work and finish it by the time they get there.

Website – this will become a live feed of events and will be synchronized with social media platforms, mostly Facebook for sharing articles and comments, Twitter for fast linking to articles, positioning services like FourSquare that will integrate with a smart adverting system that will know exactly what to offer the read and so on. Most of the content will remain free because when it comes to news there will be someone that will offer the same for free. But we will see less in depth articles and even less rich media like videos and images. It will be somewhere in the middle between a nowadays newspaper and a magazine in its digital form.

The continuing existence of the website is probably due to the fact that many readers are finding themselves in front of the computer for many hours of the day and this is a solution to reach them since they cannot just pull out a newspaper or an Ipad in the middle of work and start reading it.

E-readers/Ipad and similar devices – now we reach the real revolution. Newspapers longing to expand their exposure to their readers’ with the ideal goal of reaching 100% of their waking hours. The physical newspaper is read on the way to work, the articles on the website are read during work and when you get home you have time and patience to commit for reading. And mobile devices will provide the kind of content that fit that state of mind of the readers. What the readers were deprived in the newspaper and the website like long magazine-like article with rich media they will get here. But it will come in a price that they will have to pay. Back to DN’s pricing policy, rather they are cashing on the hype around Ipad or just cashing on those who are willing to pay is unclear, but this is how paid content will look like. The readers will pay more but they will get they paid for, a long lasting entertainment that they can take anywhere and read anytime.