Paul Carr’s New Startup, and Why I’m Cheering

As a medium, the internet represents the lowest strata of content, a veritable cesspool littered with spammy, misspelled, grammatically incorrect writing. If it is not being hammered into the nightmares of English majors worldwide (that would, by the way, include yours truly) by internet ‘marketers’, spun into often hilarious psychobabble, or plagiarized by unscrupulous publications, it is being organized into inane lists or splattered across dubious websites with formulaic, page-view enhancing websites (“100 Coolest People in Tech! Yay!”).

So when one of the strongest voices in tech journalism – former TechCruncher Paul Carr – announces a new startup, The New Gambit, that promises to be a funnier version of The Economist, I can’t help but cheer on from the sidelines.

Perhaps more importantly, the ‘magazine’ (if that word is even relevant anymore) will be published only on the iPad and other tablets. That’s right: there will be no internet version. As an experiment in the viability of the iPad as a platform that can nurture high quality content, I’m sure every publisher around the world will watch it unfold with bated breath (and a silent prayer).

In Paul Carr, the startup has one of the funniest, boldest voices in the industry. He was brilliant at TechCrunch, one of the few reasons why I frequented that site, and I expect him to be brilliant at The New Gambit as well.

But what he is attempting to undertake here is something that hasn’t ever been tried, let alone pulled off successfully. It is an ambitious plan to begin with: If your startup’s pitch begins with “The Economist for…”, you’d better be extremely good if you are to keep up with that magazine’s uber high standards. That he is trying to do so solely on tablets and e-readers, while closing off all online traffic, makes it all the more challenging.

I do believe this is the course to take for any publication that wants to salvage some semblance of quality in an increasingly competitive online space. A publication that markets itself on the iPad/Kindle alone does not have to worry about the bane of online content: SEO. It can concentrate on creating great content, and letting Amazon or Apple handle the marketing and payment aspects.

A Moment of Reckoning

For the publishing industry – old and new media alike – this is a moment of reckoning. Apple has aggressively marketed the iPad as an alternative newsstand (and there’s an even an app of the same name now) – a platform that promises easier consumption, and more importantly, even easier payment for publishers. Sure enough, reputed media outfits like the NYT and New Yorker have seen a fair degree of success with the iPad. The New Yorker has been especially successful with its iPad app, and has even found ways to recycle old content by offering it as special edition apps. Even new media publications have found some success on these platforms. Ars Technica famously sold over 3,000 copies of its OS X Lion review by releasing it as a Kindle Single(s).

But a full featured, iPad/Kindle only monthly magazine is a different ball game altogether. While a Conde Nast may be able to pull it off successfully by flexing its considerable marketing muscles and deep relationships with advertisers, for an independent, small media startup of 10 writers, it is an ambitious and arduous undertaking.

Blog networks should be particularly experimented in this experiment. If The New Gambit is a success, it paves the way for others to jump in by delivering high quality content for a discerning audience (which also means larger advertising dollars, by the way). Few writers I know enjoy writing ‘Top Ten’ lists; most of them would rather work on more meaningful, deeper stories, something that their choice of platform – the internet – doesn’t quite permit (at least profitably enough). Writing for an iPad/Kindle only audience would also enable them to move above the sheer noise of the internet and the clamor for page views that is the bane of every internet writer’s existence.

I’m cheering for Carr and his ambitious undertaking. I’m cheering because I’m sick of seeing the exodus of good writers and meaningful content from this medium. I’m cheering because I’d much rather get my stories from someone who knows what he’s talking about than from yet another page view chasing blog that sandwiches it between top ten lists and slideshows.