Via oreillyradar:

Nice analysis.

It is a brilliant countermove. Apple is basically saying, “Let the subscriber decide,” knowing full well they will choose iTunes. After all, it’s simply easier for consumers to subscribe to digital publications from one place.

On a related note: This latest brouhaha over pricing and data and subscribers is a reminder that publishers should diversify beyond the App Store (or app store). The App Store needs to be one distribution channel among many.

There are still plenty of newsroom jobs that can be eliminated

It pains me to write those words. I don’t like to see fellow journalists lose their jobs, and I want my students to find gainful employment after they graduate. But the truth is that newspapers experienced an unprecedented rise in prosperity between 1960 and 2005, as former Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll pointed out in an interview with National Public Radio. During that golden age, newspaper companies were awash in so much money that they couldn’t help but invest some of it in journalism. For instance, Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth said following a round of cuts earlier this year that her paper still employed some 800 full-time journalists – more than double the number that worked at the Post during the Watergate glory days of the 1970s. Thus, when a large regional paper such as the Boston Globe concentrates on its local mission and eliminates nearly all of its staff-produced international and national reporting, it is merely returning to the model that prevailed before the 1960s and 1970s. It’s hardly an admission of defeat if most of the Globe’s non-local stories (it still maintains a robust Washington bureau) are from the Associated Press, Reuters, the NYT and other news services.

The size issue is something I’ve been mulling lately. I don’t think large media organizations — newspapers and broadcast most notably — are going to disappear altogether. They’re going to be smaller though. A lot smaller. The nichefication of content is not limited to the Web. Niches are, by their nature, not all-encompassing. There’s no need for massive overhead and large staffs. Moreover, it’s quite possible the total number of journalism jobs will increase once all the nonsense of ‘08 and ‘09 sorts out. But those jobs will be spread out over a lot of different outlets.