By Robert Gutsche Jr. and David Schwartz
It seemed impossible.
How could we go 24 hours without touching our laptops? Could we use our smart phones only for making and answering calls? Could we really live off of an iPad for all we do?
Those were the goals, anyway – to see how much we could do over 24 hours without any other device. Just the iPad.
So, for two days last week, the two of us, both journalism educators, avid news-users and news men, attempted to use Apple’s iPad for all of our electronic communications needs.
It worked – kind of.
These, then, are the major points from our iPad experience, and our thoughts on what it could do for journalism and journalism education.
Teaching
First of all, the next time someone tells you that journalism students are not interested in print, they haven’t really been talking to students. Not ours, anyway. Even before the iPad, our students at The University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication have been extremely interested – and excited – about the written word. Of course, they want all of the multimedia experience, but they also want to tell good, accurate, meaningful stories.
The iPad just pushed that excitement to new heights. As students learn about reporting and writing, for example, they can now interact with almost any media outlet in the world right in their laps. With the whisk of a finger, they interact with the media, they see how convergence should really work, where images and movement, audio and words combine for a new experience – one that they want to be a part of.
Within seconds, anywhere within a working WiFi area (3G iPads will soon be available), we can show our students good and bad news writing. We can swish from a narrative lede on one screen to a poor one on the next. Students can be introduced to news outlets they hadn’t heard about before, and we can do all of this in an informal setting, not stuck in front of a computer.
Creating
With the iPad, students now have the opportunity to not only produce content, but to design it. The striking colors, interface and mobility of the iPad encourage students to converge to share ideas, make changes with a tip of the finger, and roam the halls, the classrooms and the internet to compile their designs.
Writing
Let’s be frank: If you type with two fingers, the iPad’s for you. If you use all of them, it might be a bit tricky. Taking notes, writing grant proposals and rewriting a paper draft is perfect on the iPad. We both struggled at first to get the typing just right, and soon after that, once we were comfortable with typing, we could adequately complain about the software. Conferences with a student can be done all on the notepad app and emailed directly to the student’s inbox, along with a link to the story we were discussing.
Reading
We don’t want to talk about the future of newspapers. Only to say this: The papers have never looked better. In fact, both of us found ourselves reading more, including story jumps. For whatever reason (maybe because jumps on the iPad are just flicks of the finger), the text, embedded video and audio, and ads are easier on the iPad than even a subway tab. And it’s not just reading. NPR’s App, for instance, shows radio like it should be: Sassy, stylish, relevant and revealing.
Final thoughts
This essay is not a commercial for the iPad. It is costly. It is limiting. It is a bit heavy. It is not perfect. Our message is not to tell you to go get one. (David, for sure, is waiting a generation or two before purchasing his own.)
Instead, our experiment tells us three main things we want to share:
One: You can’t go all day with just one communications device. We both broke the rules. Robert needed his laptop to chat on Facebook and gchat, and that couldn’t happen on the iPad. David reverted to Twittering via iPhone because its compact size lends itself more to transportability.
Two: More devices don’t mean less trouble balancing things. Sitting at a microfilm machine, Robert listened to his iPod Touch, needed to use his laptop to transfer PDFs from the scanner, had his BlackBerry ready for a call and wondered why the iPad couldn’t make it all the more easier. Today’s technology has brought us fewer cords, but more things to carry.
Three: Most importantly, our experiment opened our eyes to where journalism has gone – and where it is going. Print isn’t dead, neither is content. iPads, and other soon-to-be-available tablets, represent a new beginning.
Robert Gutsche is a Ph.D. student at The University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication and is a co-founder of the nonprofit Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism (www.iowawatch.org).
David Schwartz, a former reporter and editor, is Executive Director of the Iowa High School Press Association (http://www.uiowa.edu/~ihspa/) and an adjunct instructor at The University of Iowa’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication.