Newsletters are not meant to save journalism

Behold media’s otherworldly talent of keeping the hope alive: the recycled hype around “new” methods of presenting (and charging for) online content is back

Eleven years ago, at a press event on January 2010, Apple introduced the iPad in that memorable keynote that The Wall Street Journal anticipated with the famous “last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it,” a hell of a sentence that Steve Jobs slipped into his presentation.

One of the headliners of that day, besides the iPad itself, was another newspaper though: The New York Times. When Jobs showed how browsing the web on an iPad was “really great,” the Times was the first website he accessed; when a few selected developers were announced to show their new iPad apps, the newspaper was also one of the firsts to take the stage.

Was there a PR strategy behind all this love for The New York Times? Of course, there was. But that relationship worked both ways. Just as Apple was going all-in to build a market from the ground up and needed as much free publicity as possible, news media companies saw the iPad as “the next version of digital journalism,” to use the same words that Martin Nisenholtz, from the Times…