garciamedia

Jan. 27th Welcome iPad…....we are ready!

Updated Thursday, 28-1-10 at 12:42 EST

TAKEAWAY: iPad, January 27, 2010: we at Garcia Media and Garcia Interactive celebrate and prepare to serve our clients in this renaissance of storytelling through the best platform yet.

A thing of beauty, the promise of a revolutionary tool; reading forever changed

It is finally here.

It was good to see Steve Jobs doing the introduction of the new and aptly called iPad.  Seeing how it works made you want to rush to get one immdiately.

The experience of reading, sorting photos and checking emails will be changed dramatically, not to mention how we buy books, newspapers, magazines.

Time for everyone in our profession to step back, review the introductory videos for the iPad, and to see how this new device may alter how we work, how we tell stories, and how we connect more directly with our audiences.

Right now, the iPad 1.0 is just that, a baby a few hours into a world that certainly needs it.  I can only imagine how this baby will grow, and the potential it presents and the opportunities for all of us in the storytelling business.  I’d like to see what this iPad will be like when it starts crawling (maybe by the end of the year), not to mention when it starts walking. 

This is a moment to celebrate.

Exciting times ahead, indeed.

Steve Jobs calmly and enthusiastically reveals, step by step, how his new creation, the iPad, works

We are ready!

The one newspaper shown in iPad demo is The New York Times: others are watching and considering their options in this new medium

At Garcia Media, and most specifically at Garcia Interactive, Mario Garcia Jr. and I have been preparing for months for the day when the iPad would be introduced.  In our daily work with media companies worldwide, a day has not gone by when a discussion has taken place about how the storytelling process would be changed, and how each of the titles with which we are involved would react when it came to presenting their content in tablet form——be it an Apple or any other such device.

Mario Garcia Jr. has been blogging about it, and working diligently with his team on what it would involve for our company, as well as how the iPad would change newsroom dynamics.

Team effort is the key, and we recognize the importance of bringing together the best and most creative minds to the task of adapting content and dissemination of information through the iPad.

More than just a visual mode of presentation, the iPad will require a serious, in depth analysis of how we update information, how we rethink the role of interaction and multimedia.  In many newsrooms, these are processes that have been reviewed for online editions.  Now it is necessary to take them one step further.

Media rethink is a centerpiece of 2010, and the iPad has offered us the best opportunity——and platform——to carry it out.

Enter Joe Zeff Design

We are happy to announce that we are partnering with Joe Zeff Design to help facilitate this “media rethink” process for the newspaper industry. Joe is a former Graphics Director of Time magazine and Presentation Editor of The New York Times and his studio has designed hundreds of major magazine covers, and offers a unique combination of editorial experience and animation capability that is precisely tuned to the needs of Tablet-driven publications.

We hope to provide newspapers worldwide with the tools and talent to approach this new and decisive time for what we call journalism.  We believe that one thing remains unchanged in this landscape of a truly revolutionary moment for the media: storytelling.  The good story will continue to be the beacon that guides us.

The iPad offers an unparalleled platform to enhance storytelling in its various forms.

That is what we hope to emphasize as we help our clients get ready for the iPad age.

In a nod to Amazon and its tablet device, the Kindle, Steve Jobs said that Apple now stood on the shoulders of Amazon to go beyond what the Kindle could do.

Similarly, I see Jobs standing firmly on the shoulders of what we call traditional journalism to take it to the next level.  Those are strong shoulders, indeed, but so are the promises of how the iPad can redefine the information consumption experience.

A new club is born: the iPadistas are lined up and ready to do their “finger reading”. Funny, I have been talking about the concept of “finger reading” for about 15 years. The iPad catapults the motion to its highest art form.

Of related interest

For those who read in Spanish, here is our Garcia Media Latinoamerica blog about the iPad, by Rodrigo Fino:

http://www.garcia-media.com.ar/blog/post/promesas-nada-mas/54

Oliver Reichenstein : The iPad and the Publishing Industry:
http://informationarchitects.jp/my-five-cents-on-the-thing/

TheMarioBlog post #468

Posted by Dr. Mario R. Garcia on January 27, 2010