The "Daily TelegraphLondon's has always been a newspaper to watch carefully for its ability to adapt quickly to changing times. He was the first to move into a new building in order to change the arrangement of the desks and adapt it to the new needs of a multimedia editorial office.
Now it is among the first to provide its readers with a number of interesting applications for i mobile devicesi.e. iPhone and Android smartphones. With the slogan "events on your mobile as they happen" the Telegraph is selling a subscription to the viewing of films, photos and thematic information at £1,99 a month (just under €3), guaranteeing that the user will have access to live news or seconds after the event.
The most popular application will certainly be the one that allows you to immediately see the goals scored in the English championship, but the Telegraph also guarantees live information on the economy and the stock market, and promises to cover news from abroad with films and photographic dossiers. It is only a first step, but probably in the right direction. In recent months there has been a great debate among new media experts, who are wondering if one Internet era is over and another is about to begin.
All the statistics say that the hours spent online on old desktop computers are decreasing and that on the other hand, connections from mobile devices are increasing. Likewise, fewer contacts for general sites and increase those for i thematic sites, within which users can directly find what interests them without having to waste time reading irrelevant things or discarding information that was not required.
The fact that the web is an infinite container, in which one can store as much information as one wants, had created many bouts of bulimia in newspaper editorial offices. The consensus was that the more content there was on a website, the better things would be. Journalists therefore had to write for print and online, open blogs, send films and photographs, invent columns on foreign policy, but also on gardening and pet care.
Experience has shown – so far – that these generalist containers they require great effort and do not produce significant income. The Telegraph is taking a new path, taking advantage of the fact that by now people have been accustomed by Apple and Google to pay little to download something deemed interesting on their smartphone. The money for newspapers could therefore come not from the online revival of the old generalist model of the paper newspaper, but from the sale of thematic applications of information content, which obviously must have a higher quality than that required by the old world of the Internet.
Is everything all right, then? It's not for sure. According to many observers, the "application” of the web will deprive users of the fundamentally best thing about the internet: the fact that you start out by looking for one thing and discover another that you didn't even know existed. Sailing was an exciting journey; the applications will lock us in our room, from which it will be increasingly difficult to get out.
