BendTech

['Didn't really intend for this to be a series, but our first post on the plight of the Bulletin generated so much interest that it seemed worth a quick followup.]

You couldn’t ask for a better example of how the Bulletin’s online subscription model gets in the way of what people would like to do with that content than Nicole Santa Cruz’s article [bendbulletin.com subscription required] yesterday on local Twitter usage.  To the frustration of the subjects in the article, there’s no way to share it with their followers:

bendproper: #inbend I’ll bet @bendbulletin could have gained some readership today from local twitter users. Instead it’s a #paywall #fail

thesachambers: Apparently the Bend Bulletin published article about Twitter today… no wonder so many new followers… can’t read it though

juliejulie: @lorsturm Ha! I actually don’t see many new followers after I’m in the Bend Bulletin because there’s no live link to spread around!

In other Bulletin-related news, according to a Source Weekly article that quotes an internal memo, the Bulletin’s revenue is back to 2003-levels, and they’re implementing 10% paycuts.  Employees are also required to take an additional 2-days a month off (read “mandatory 5 unpaid weeks of vacation per year”).  And then there’s Warren Buffet’s dagger-in-the-heart comments to investors about the newspaper industry in general:

“For most newspapers in the United States, we would not buy them at any price,” Buffett said. “They have the possibility of nearly unending losses. … I do not see anything on the horizon that sees that erosion coming to an end.”

There might be a tiny bright spot on the horizon though: rumors of a large-format Kindle intended for reading magazines and newspapers.  It’s being hyped as a device intended for magazine and newspaper content but, personally, I’m taking that with a grain of salt.  I suspect that’s just Amazon’s marketing department saying,  “We’ve finally realized that having an e-reader like the Kindle 2 that devotes less than 50% of the viewable area to the display was a pretty dumb idea, and if we don’t fix it soon Apple is gonna eat our lunch.”

Or to put that in pictures, here’s the current Kindle 2 .vs. an artist’s concept of what the Apple eBook might look like:

[Update: iTablet concept design (pictured on right) by Gerry Manacsa, who I just discovered has a pretty cool design blog]