If ever there were a minority in this world that didn’t need advocacy, it would be people who are committed to reading Esquire on their iPads.
All the same, here we are. There seems to have been a spot of trouble at the iTunes store: The iPad version of the magazine’s November issue was delayed. According to reports, the content was just too racy, and Esquire had to take another run at meeting Apple’s decency standards before it was allowed through. By the time the issue made it to the iPad, the month was half over.
The dust-up, such as it was, barely registered. The Internet – and you’ll just have to take my word on this – is not short of pictures of half-naked people. But Apple’s sudden concern with images of a woman in her underwear bodes poorly for the publishing utopia we were expecting. If Steve Jobs is the distributor of the future, press freedom could be a thing of the past.
It has been a whole seven months that we’ve been sharing this planet with the iPad. At the time of its release, the popular sport was trying to guess at its true significance; one common idea was that it would save the print media. After all, the press (if press reports were to be believed) was, at that point, tied to the railroad tracks and kicking its little legs while player-piano music filled the scene.
The iPad held out a couple of promises to cash-starved publishers: One was a new medium that might grab fickle readers who were over the thrill of pulp-and-paper products. More to the point, Apple held out the promise of a revenue stream: The Web has created a generation of readers who were used to getting everything for free, and advertising isn’t the money-maker it once was. Apple, meanwhile, has created a parallel universe in which consumers were spending billions to purchase media on iTunes. Surely, the thinking went, there’s gold in them thar apps.
(The jury is still out on how profitable the iTunes store is for Apple itself. Apple’s long-standing assertion is that iTunes isn’t there to make money, but to help sell iPads and iPhones, much like Saturday-morning cartoons really existed to sell toys.) Today, the land of iPad periodicals still has a bit of the Wild West about it: Untamed and unstandardized news apps roam the landscape as publishers try to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
In this context, the news that Esquire had to tone down the racy bits to be published at the App Store realizes fears that have been murmured since Apple posited itself as the distributor of the future: Can a company that’s proved infamously fickle about deciding which apps will be sold in its store and which won’t really be hands-off about editorial content? Could a corporation with a messianic leader whose success derives from, among other things, obsessive design control really stand back? The answer is, apparently not.
“Pornography,” whispered a friend, “is whatever gives Steve Jobs an erection.”Even now that attention is turning from apps to news, control remains the order of the day. This week brought reports that Rupert Murdoch, the tycoon behind such world-improving entities as Fox News, has partnered with Mr. Jobs on a new tablet-only newspaper. Among other things, Mr. Murdoch is known online for putting up pay walls around The Wall Street Journal and The Times of London. (He’s also known for being the guy who bought MySpace, which is worth keeping in mind.)
Compared with Mr. Murdoch, Apple seems a benign dictator: We’ll keep an iron-fisted lock on what can and can’t be sold on our service, Apple says, but it’s for your benefit. Compare that model to the commercial anarchy of Amazon, where bestsellers commingle with erotica, items listed as jokes and the dubiously legal. Last week, an online vigilante mob went after an author who’d listed an appreciation of pedophilia on Amazon.
This is not the Apple way. Nor, like Mr. Murdoch, does it happily use its empire to promote its politics. But is a company that sanitizes content on the grounds of keeping its store shiny really any better than a company that controls content to pursue a political agenda? All of this puts content creators in a bind. People who like getting paid to write generally like the idea of people paying to read. The open Web is free – free as in unrestricted, free as in unprofitable. The closed world of Apple might pay, but at what price?
Apple might move away from treating publications as apps, and distribute newspapers the way it distributes songs – more liberally, at any rate, than it sells apps. This could be a positive step. But a truly free press requires the presence of not just provocative moderates, but also extremes – and I have doubts that Apple has that kind of appetite under any marketing schema.
Neither the iTunes model nor Apple’s culture meshes with the needs of a free press. And if Apple-compliance starts to become an editorial objective, the sudden toning-down of half-naked-lady-pictures will be the least of our concerns.
