The 'iPod for news': Did tablets and paywalls save the newspaper industry? (2025)

Updated December 2025: Revisiting our 2008 prediction.

In 2008 the world was waiting for a digital device that would do for newspapers what the iPod did for music. At the time there were no obvious candidates but a few promising developments.

There were hopes that a dedicated ePaper device might fill the gap. This would be like the Kindle, but better suited for frequently updated news reports. The Kindle's physical format was promising and its ability to display crisp, easy-to-read text. It would help if the news device could display editorial photographs.

A story in ComputerWorld looked the future of ePaper, which the author said was “just around the corner”.

ePaper looked a plausible candidate

ePaper clearly had potential. It could disrupt publishing business models which were already under attack from the internet.

Yet, at the time, ePaper is “just around the corner” was questionable. Claims like that can never be taken seriously until practical products hit the market.

I’ve been writing about technology since 1980. In that year I saw my first voice recognition system and the first example of what we now call electronic books or ebooks. The proud makers of the 1981 voice recognition device said their hardware would be “ready for prime time” within two years and keyboards would quickly be a thing of the past.

In 2008 voice recognition technology is still around two years away from prime time.

Ebooks didn't hit take-off

Likewise, in 1981 electronic book makers were confidently predicting we’d soon be cuddling up at night with their hardware. By 2008 there still wasn’t been anything as impressive or as easy to read as ink stamped or squirted on crushed, dead trees. Old fashioned books refused to die. Printed newspapers, on the other hand, appeared to be on the way out.

Another possibility at the time was the iPod-derived iPhone, which was still new in 2008. It has a tiny screen and people were skeptical about its ability to become the iPod for news.

In the meantime, the internet continued to build momentum delivering news and other information to desktops, laptops and handheld devices like Apple’s iPhone. Although none of these were anything like as satisfactory an as paper, people could use them to read news. Many had already switched to getting news that way.

The view from 2025

Looking back, the phone handset won by default due to ubiquity, not superior reading experience. Today the majority of news readers get their fix through their iPhone or Android phone.

The iPad and other tablets became a supplementary news reading device. They are ideal for immersive reading but lacking the necessary ubiquity to be the sole news reader.

It turns out all the fretting about screen quality and creating a better reading experience was focusing on the wrong problems. Yes, there are better devices for consuming text-based material, but the device in everyone's pocket is always going to win any competition.

What was not apparent in 2008 is that publishers would adapt to the preferred format. In time the dominance of the mobile-first design model, where speed and scrolling trump the print-like page fidelity promised by ePaper.

In many cases news publishers build dedicated apps for phones and tablets. This has the added advantage of deepening their relationship with readers and increasing their ability to learn more about those readers so they can better target advertising.

New models changing: Paywalls and the creator economy

Before anyone had heard of the internet, newspapers made fortunes from physical copy sales. In the UK, the big newspapers would sell millions of copies each day. the revenue from print sales was so large that advertising barely featured in the most popular British papers.

In most of the rest of the world, newspapers were financed by advertising sales.

The transition from physical sales to digital revenue models has been hard. Up to a point it is still a work in progress. At one point the iPad model looked promising. This involved iTunes-enabled micro-transactions. Some titles still sell subscriptions this way. Meanwhile the websites use paywalls and subscriptions as a way of charging for content. Other, smaller news operations use alternative subscription models.

Early attempts at paywalls failed. While they worked for publishers with exclusive coverage of lucrative niche markets, most obviously in business journalism, more general news publishers struggled. Major players like the New York Times and The Guardian relied on massive scale delivering readers to advertisers with high-quality, high-cost journalism.

Advertising Failure 

In practice, tech giants Google and Meta (Facebook) captured nearly all the digital advertising revenue, forcing newspapers to go subscription-only to survive. The Guardian continues a free model, but carpet-bombs readers with needy promotions begging for 'donations,' degrading the reading experience for those unable or unwilling to pay.

Most surviving news publishers rely on traditional paywalls and subscriptions. The irony is that insisting on subscriptions gives publishers greater visibility of exactly who is reading. This information is valuable when it comes to selling better-targeted advertising.

Beyond the institutional paywall is the rise of Substack and other newsletter models. This site runs on Ghost Pro, which offers an alternative approach to online publishing and newsletters. There's no charge here, but adding one would be relatively easy.

The rise of the independent journalist blogger

Substack and newsletters represent the true decentralised evolution of the "journalist blogger" first discussed on this site in 2008. With it journalists can cut out the publisher and take the vast majority of the revenue.

It's long been known that the two ways to make money off any media in the digital age are aggregation (putting things together, e.g., major news sites) and disaggregation (pulling them apart, e.g., individual newsletters).

If a journalist focuses on a high-value niche—most likely business, finance or specific areas of politics—there's a ready market for their expertise. This is the long tail of journalism. You don't need millions of readers to make a specialist niche pay, a thousand subscribers paying a modest sum is enough for a reasonable income.

News and journalism are not like music

Let's go back to the start of this post, the point about "a digital device that would do for newspapers what the iPod did for music." In some ways, the analogy is unrealistic. Today, the iPod functionality is wrapped into every iPhone. Android phones act the same way.

Music fans can buy all-you-can-eat streaming music from Spotify or Apple Music. They can also buy single tracks and albums. These models never worked for news. Instead, we have paywalls or the Patreon-Substack direct creator support model. And that brings us to the key point: The real disruption was not about the device, but the revenue model.

In 2008, one UK journalist predicted the future of news would be a "small hub of professional journalists" with citizen journalists on the periphery. He was wrong.

The distinction between the "professional journalist" and the "citizen journalist" is now obsolete. The device (the phone) was merely the delivery mechanism; the real iPod-like disruption was the technology that allowed the writer to get paid directly.

The new professional journalist is simply one who can:

• Own their audience: Control the email list (Substack/Ghost).
• Command a niche: Offer expertise valuable enough to justify a subscription.

The modern news landscape is not a single hub, but a decentralised network of powerful, independent creators competing with large institutions. In 2025, the writer’s brand is often stronger than the publisher’s brand. That's a concept that was almost unthinkable when this article was first written.

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