Businesses wanting to grab people's attention have two options: advertising and publicity. They are not the same.

Advertising is a commercial deal between your business and the media.

You buy a fixed amount of print space, billboards, radio or TV airtime, or web traffic. You take responsibility for providing the advertising material – called copy in the industry – at your cost.

If you've got the budget, you can hire creative specialists to prepare the copy for you. It's usually worth the cost. Advertising professionals know how to get results.

As an advertiser you are in control. You decide when and where your adverts run. You have the last say over the message.

Advertising is expensive. Publicity is often cheaper. It is also riskier.

Publicity is when you grab people's attention in other ways. If you hire a publicist, a public relations expert or a press officer, those people will attempt to place stories in the media on your behalf. They can't usually guarantee anyone will sit up and take notice.

You have far less control with publicity. It works best when you have something newsworthy or interesting to say. If it isn't interesting then the media will ignore it. And your story can be crowded out on days when there are other more interesting stories.

Editors and journalists' first responsibility is to their readers. It's not their job to sell your business. It is their job to keep readers informed and interested.

Publicity is a scattergun. It can work. It might not. Use advertising to make certain your message reaches your target audience. It acts like a guided missile and costs about as much.

It is early days for newspaper pay walls. The experience so far says successful pay walls have four things in common.

Newspaper pay walls work for business newspapers like The National Business Review (NBR), The Australian Financial Review and The Financial Times.

Commentators often say pay walls and subscriptions work for niche titles providing specialist coverage and editorial quality.

This is true. For example, I work for CommsDay, which is a successful specialist niche title covering the telecommunications market. CommsDay doesn't use a pay wall – it is a daily PDF newsletter.

However, there's more to getting readers to pay for digitally delivered publications than occupying a specialist niche.

I've identified three other things needed for success:

• Quality. All the above titles are editorially excellent and professional. They are the best in their field.
• Appeal to well-heeled audience. People who buy online subscriptions are richer than average readers. Business people often have personal or company-wide budgets for buying media.
• Quick. Pay walls work when readers need information fast. They have to find it more convenient to whip out the credit card and pay for a subscription than walk to the local shop and buy a print copy of the publication or spend 30 minutes Googling for information.

Bad advertisements make me wish I used an ad-blocker.

Take noisy online advertisements. They wake up my sleepy family, disturb co-workers and interfere with telephone calls.

Thanks to them, my computer speakers are switched off a lot of the time. I miss useful audio cues.

An ad-blocker might be handy dealing with video commercials and those annoying animated things that dance across the screen.

But I'm not going to block ads.

Advertising pays for the best stuff online. Without online advertising, we would have to pay for everything we read, hear or see on the Internet.

There's nothing illegal or immoral about blocking ads. Ad-blocking isn't killing the internet.

But it is damaging. It means publishers invest less in writers and other media. It means there are fewer jobs.

I'm a journalist. I earn a living because people pay me to produce words.

There are three ways I can get paid:

1. Commissioning: People pay me directly to write.
2. Copy sales: Readers buy a print publication or subscribe to an online title or go through a pay wall.
3. Advertising: Advertisers pay me when somebody reads my words and, at the same time, looks at an advertisement.
   

If you want to read online and you block ads, then subscribe to online pay wall sites or start commissioning copy because these are the only two options over the long term.

Steve Yelvington is on the money when he says Apple’s iPad is not the new print.

Like me he thinks Apple has the tablet computer just about right “from a usability perspective”. And for many people, tablets will replace PCs.

Yelvington says old media companies like the iPad because it seems to return things to the business model they know and understand.

In my view, the iPad could herald a new era for the publishing industry, but it requires new business models. I don’t think selling iPad apps or expensive electronic editions of print magazines is the answer.

I doubt selling banner advertising, advertorial or ad words is the answer either. But both approaches may have a place in whatever publishing business model emerges.

A whack on the head from Maslow's hammer | yelvington.com

Just when the New York Times (NYT) most needs to show it can play in the digital world, it proves its cluelessness over online publishing by demanding Apple remove Pulse an iPad RSS reader.

Writing for The Sydney Morning Herald, Australian tech journalist Adam Turner says the NYT has made “a fool of itself in front of the online audience it so desperately wants to woo”.

Turner is bang on the money.

The NYT says Pulse infringes its rights. But the RSS feed it delivers to iPad readers is publically available and free. Moreover the NYT publishes the feed. When readers see an interesting headline, they click-through to the paper’s own website.

If the NYT doesn’t like this, it could kill its RSS feed.

As Turner points out, in the eyes of the NYT Pulse’s biggest crime isn’t serving up its stories, but doing the job in style.

Ovum, a technology analyst firm, says Apple’s iPad isn’t the silver bullet newspaper owners are hoping for.

In a report dated May 28, the company says: “Apple’s much-hyped tablet device alone will fail to secure the future of news and magazine publishing.”

Adrian Drury, Ovum’s principal media and broadcasting analyst and report co-author, say: “The iPad promise is a set of new distribution channels for packaged media, but it is one device and volumes will take time to build. Traditional publishing’s challenge to find a new and sustainable business model is immediate.”

The company also says the market for iPad media will quickly become “congested”.

The company forecasts Apple will have shipped 13.2 million iPads by the end of 2011. This compares with 25 million iPhones shipped in 2009 alone.

Rupert Murdoch says Apple's iPad is a "potential saviour of newspapers". His wishful thinking doesn't stand close scrutiny.

On the plus side moving to the iPad will save publishers the cost of printing on mashed dead trees, wrapping and distributing.

Apple's 30% cut of revenue is the same as the mark-up made by newsagents and other physical outlets selling newspapers – so no savings there.

Editorial costs will remain the same. So the savings will be relatively small.

However you cut it, fewer readers will buy a digital newspaper than a printed newspaper.

You don't need special equipment to read a printed newspaper. Apple may have sold a million iPads, but that's not even 0.1% of the today's potential newspaper readership.

Even if this obstacle was overcome, fewer readers will pay for digital subscriptions than print subscriptions. The evidence to date suggests only 5% would pay, but even if this number was 25%, that's a huge drop in copy sales revenue.

Fewer readers means less adverting revenue.

And there will fewer readers per purchase. Printed newspapers are passed on. It will be harder to legally pass-on an iPad newspaper. This means even less advertising revenue.

True, iPad readers, who are identifiable are worth more to advertisers than unidentifiable print newspaper readers.

We'll put aside for now the idea that free online newspapers will get the lion's share of advertising.

The numbers don't stack up to support the idea that the iPad will save the newspaper industry.

Apple's iPad is the first of a wave of products which will rebuild the media landscape. They'll change media, but they are not the panacea Rupert Murdoch says they are.

My New Zealand media on Twitter list is still available on this site. It has been updated many times with two new entries yesterday and four updates. If you think you should be on the list, or if you are on the list and think your entry needs to change, please get in touch.

In addition to the HTML list I've also created a Twitter list:@billbennettnz/new-zealand-media-people.

Everyone who is on the HTML list is now on the Twitter list.

Update: The list name has changed to NZ media on Twitter