The Daily Mail is a joy to read, mainly because you never know what delicious nugget of editorial bizzarreness you’ll find in its column inches: photos that have nothing to do with the story, misidentified subjects, ads for products published as regular content; it’s British tabloid journalism at its finest (?) and I think they even lean slightly conservative. I mainly read it because I enjoy reading about where the latest UFO was spotted and what Daphne Guinness or Helena Bonham Carter are wearing this week (love them both). But they have no idea what an iPad is.

The Daily Mail realizes that reading a speech in document form off of an iPad is not the same as having it continuously fed to you via teleprompter, yes? Or that an iPad and a teleprompter are two different things?

It sounds like she’s just reading bullet points from her iPad. If she was using one of the teleprompter apps, she would have lost her space as she pauses multiple times including an interrupting train. Not to engage in “iPad-gate,” it does look as though she’s rolling the screen up manually using her thumb.

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- Politifact defends its lie of the year:

We’ve read the critiques and see nothing that changes our findings. We stand by our story and our conclusion that the claim was the most significant falsehood of 2011. We made no judgments on the merits of the Ryan plan; we just said that the characterization by the Democrats was false.

- Who owns a Twitter account: the employee or employer?

- Michael Medved deconstructs a wonky poll used by media to declare that marriage is dead.

- Only Jay Carney could make an enemy of the media.

- China jails blogger for 10 years:

A Chinese court has handed down a 10-year jail sentence to Chen Xi, the second dissident in four days to be convicted of inciting subversion through online essays …

… The intermediate people’s court in Guiyang, in south-west China’s Guizhou region, tried Chen Xi, 57, on charges linked to more than 30 political essays he published online.

“The judge said this was a major crime that had a malign impact,” his wife, Zhang Qunxuan, told Reuters by phone after the trial. The judge said Chen was a repeat offender who deserved a long sentence, she added.

Chen has insisted he was innocent, but will not appeal. “The court ignored all the points raised by the defence lawyer at the trial, so what point is there in appealing?” said Zhang.

- Google to unveil an “iPad killer” in six months. Yes! Another device upon which to run the clunky, fragmented Android OS! Any hope of an “iPad killer” died when HP screwed the pooch when it tanked its WebOS mobile devices after buying out Palm. So no, save your iPads and media-reading apps. (Steve Jobs disliked unions and was a capitalist, so I feel justified.)

- As Argentina seizes newsprint, freedom of the press suffers:

What’s the oldest trick in the dictator’s handbook? Why, to seize the newsprint. Fresh from a big electoral win, Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez has pulled that hoary stunt, topping even Hugo Chavez.

By a vote of 41-26, Argentina’s Senate passed a law to nationalize all newsprint, of course in “the national interest.”

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Apple has announced its new iPad tablet computer, marking the dawn of a new kind of device that bridges the gap between phone and laptop. Last November I wrote about the possibilities of this device for the print world over at Big Hollywood. In short, the potential is there to revolutionize the way we read print, from newspapers, books, magazines and comics?

The cost of paper, shipping and distribution are a problem for publishers. So is making their products easily available to consumers. Stores only have limited space and money to carry books. The internet has been a great boon in that regard in terms of sales, but reading on a computer screen can be an unappealing prospect to most people. The iPad is designed to change all that: a hand-held, touch-screen device that is high resolution and extremely light (about a pound and 1/2). It’s not only lighter than a book, you can carry hundreds of books and magazines in it and read them anywhere you’d take a book.

The print business is salivating over this device, seeing it as a platform that will do for print that iTunes did for music. Except iTunes has sold a lot of songs, but it has also impacted the music business in ways few could have foreseen. Industry insiders think it destroyed the album as people started buying songs separately.  Moving their content to digital it could have similar effects on publishers and the press, but the fact is, times are changing and print has gotten very expensive. (more…)