The social and technological impact of tablets in the journalism field: a comparative analysis of communicative and business strategies of the newspapers on iPad

The paper aims at presenting how the newspapers are coping with the challenges offered by iPad and tablets, and it deals with the changes related to the new mobile devices in the information system. The attention is focused on the Italian journalism, compared to the Portuguese one. The paper presents a research based on the analysis of all apps for iPad of the Italian daily newspapers, in order to study the main features of the new digital formats with respect to properties related to four thematic areas (multimediality, hypertextuality, social media models, and business strategies). The Italian newspaper apps are compared with the main Portuguese ones with respect to the same characteristics, with a communicative and social perspective, focusing on the opportunities and the limits of tablets in the editorial and information system. The comparison shows that all the Italian newspapers offer pdf edition on iPad, although with different levels of innovation. The Portuguese context is different for two main reasons: on one hand the strategies of the publishers are more variegate and some of them don’t offer the pdf release on the other hand a website oriented model is more common. The innovation is weak in both of them, even if there are efforts to take advantage of the new media opportunities. The paper contributes to the debate about new forms of journalism and allows to reflect on the new challenges which iPad and other mobile devices represent for journalists and publishers. They are not based only on tablets, but also on newspapers, Internet and the capability to manage the relationship between the different media.