Two images from the Alexandre Herchcovitch show. (left: Jennifer Branken, right: Jessie Adler/Milk Studios)

As sartorialists make their biannual pilgrimage from New York to London to Milan to Paris, some veteran tent-dwellers still have a pebble stuck in their Louboutins from Lincoln Center.

The glossy editor’s anxiety over being edged out of the front row, it seems, has migrated over to the media riser and down to the pit. What was once the province of professional photogs, to hear them tell it, has been overrun by iPhone and iPad wielding bloggers who wouldn’t know a bounce flash from a zoom lens. And they’re hogging up the press passes for backstage beauty shots!

Shortly after they turned off the stage lights and sopped up the champagne, a handful of disgruntled photographers reached out to The Observer to kvetch. Slights ranged from being turned away from shows, to an errant iPhone interrupting their runway image, to discovering that the insolent photo-bloggers never learned the etiquette about getting your shot and moving on.

One accredited photographer, who wanted to remain anonymous for fear of being “black-listed,” is even in the process of drafting a “letter of grievance,” calling it “my sort of manifesto, to explain to them what it is to be a photographer, if they choose to separate the bacon from the pig, so to speak.” (We wonder how well the fashion crowd will relate to a pork metaphor, however.)

Those who make their money through licensed images that go out to newswires and magazines, insist that it hurts designers to have Google Images flooded with subpar photographs that, literally, show their garments in a poor light.

What’s worse, experienced photographers moan, these bloggers do it all in “front-of-house” attire, with an attitude to match. “They’re dressed to the hilt and pull a point-and-shoot out of their Louis Vuitton,” said Jennifer Polixenni Brankin, a fashion and editorial photographer who has shot twelve seasons around the globe. “They’re just really kids who want to get into Fashion Week. We tapped one of the girls and was like, ‘Where is your camera?’ and she was unbelievably rude.”

Three years ago, the fashion press began noting, through gritted, gleaming teeth, how quickly an online following earned Tavi Gevinson and BryanBoy a seat beside Anna. Now, trained photographers, already circling the lower rungs of the Fashion Week ladder, find themselves competing with a contingent of kids who’ve never heard of color correction.

“I can’t speak for the brands but I hope they would care. They spend a lot of money to put out a fabulous show and that’s a significant investment and I hope they would want the very best photography and the very best pictures coming out,” said Fern Mallis, the renowned former senior vice president of IMG Fashion, best known for running New York Fashion Week for more than a decade. “Like I say, everyone who has an iPhone or an iPad isn’t a photographer. Nor is every blogger, a writer or a critic who has the knowledge and the history to edit, digest and communicate what the collections are about...”

But brands, given the choice between online eyeballs on the cheap and a beautiful glossy magazine shot want, well, both. “I had to take camera phone photos while I was taking actual photos for some of the shows I was at just because they wanted to put them on Instagram,” Los Angeles-based photographer Mark Luebbers said of the client who sent him to New York.

“We love, we love, we love glossy magazines. But the bloggers are reaching a different demographic, and it really is helping the reach of these designers,” said Flint Beamon, an expert in “back of house” management for PR Consulting. “It’s in the best interest that everybody tries to get along. Obviously this is not the case.”

Accredited photographers insist they just want more vetting—and their rightful place back. “I will not waste my company’s time if I’m on second or third row or in a back position on a riser, then I can’t give my agency a marketable image. My image is preset at a price based on what my agency’s expenses are including my salary. So they can’t give it away. I’m in jeopardy. We’re all in jeopardy,” said the photographer drafting the memo. (Paging 2007, says everyone in media.)

In prior seasons, explained Ms. Mallis, the media riser is typically filled with “Photographers who shoot for credible places” and people who are “grandfathered in because everybody knows who they are and they've been shooting for years.” The pecking order of the riser can be every bit as hierarchical as those rows of white chairs, with photogs using tape to indicate their spot—something bloggers may not have picked up on. “They have their own system and they figure out who sits where and who does what and that's part of the mix of the photographers’s pit. The conflict and energy you get with these gruff men and women on the media riser juxtaposed against the well-heeled audience is part of the experience of a fashion show,” said one PR insider, adding, “Ultimately these photographers from the agencies, most of whom are freelancers that get paid only when their images are used-I don't want to say have less reach-but they have a different kind of relevance than they used to in the past."

PR Consulting, the firm where Mr. Beamon works, represents MADE Fashion Week, an alternate to the IMG-run affair that was launched to support young designers in 2009. In a statement to The Observer, Made explained that bloggers are essential to reach what they claim is 11 million viewers through its digital platforms, noting, “Made does not grant access to any shows for specific bloggers, but rather representatives who capture content that is then aggregated to specific sites such as Tumblr, Milkmade.com, or the MADE Fashion Week app.” Ms. Brankin had a different theory, “It seems they’re in bed with Tumblr for Fashion Week,” she said

IMG, which runs the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, offered the following statement about its vetting process, “IMG takes the process of registering and credentialing of media seriously and continually updates these processes to be in line with current technology as well as best practices. We review the credentials of hundreds of new outlets each season and attempt to only credential those that are most relevant.”

Organizers from both camps also point out that PR firms for the designers themselves get to decide whom to invite backstage. Besides, the PR insider noted, failing to credential lower tier outlets just prompts them to get around the process by getting a badge from a B or C list designer, “So all of a sudden they're running around with just the backstage credential and we don't really have any sort of influence over their movements.”

Add to that the fact that old guard may not be as well-behaved as they think. “They hang out until the very last moment, until I kick them out normally. It’s not that they get their photography and they leave. That never happens. And if it does, it’s because they have another show to go to,” said Mr. Beamon

“It's clear that bloggers are a significant presence, but I'm not sure all of them are justified in their presence and their sense of entitlement and when they belong and how important they are,” noted Ms. Mallis, who recently discussed this issue with BryanBoy on her Sirius XM radio show.

Of course, she’s been proven wrong before. BryanBoy once tweeted out a link to his 233,000 Twitter followers, “Remember how Fern Mallis said "twitter won't bring orders for a designer"? well, check this wsj article out.” That was 2009.

-ntiku@observer.com

During the first week of Newsstand--the Apple iOS 5 feature which is making marketing iPad publications much easier--News Corp.'s Daily was the top-grossing app.

“It’s intriguing that an upstart publication is beating Condé Nast titles and the New York Times,” editor Jesse Angelo told Keith Kelly yesterday.

Indeed, The Daily outsold National Geographic, WIRED, The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, Cosmopolitan, Martha Stewart Living, Popular Mechanics and Popular Science, which have both much larger print circulations and a higher monthly price point.

The confidence is contagious.

Today the Daily's Tumblr posted a screenshot of The New York Times iPad app, which had not been updated to include the breaking news about Qaddafi's death.

"It’s 1:00pm. Something is missing from the front page of the New York Times’s iPad app…" they wrote.

Mr. Angelo also told the Post that of the 130,000 readers of The Daily (10k more than Edmund Lee reported last month), 85,000 pay for it, and they convert free trial-ers to subscribers at a rate of 12-15%.

Although it launched in conjunction with the October issue, the app is unrelated to W print editions. It is "a daily offering of exquisite 'must sees' and 'must haves' carefully curated by the editors of W," including exclusive video content. It's all shoppable and will reward users who are first to share content over social media with designer giveaways.

“The Daily W is an incredible expression of W’s DNA made for a completely different medium.  We are very excited about the new daily relationship this app will establish with our readers,” W editor-in-chief Stefano Tonchi said in a statement.

The app is sponsored exclusively by Calvin Klein, which seems to be the preferred strategy for brands dabbling in tablet media. Ralph Lauren bought solo sponsorship of The New York Times iPad app for September.

It contains some 400 still photographs and hours of video clips. It will be free to the public between September 1 and September 12 (mark your calendar) and can be purchased for $9.95 thereafter.

And it will be available exclusively on the Apple iPad.

“The app lays it out in clear bold chunks—here’s the story before, when the World Trade Center was being built, and then after it was built, and the day of the attacks, and what’s happened since,” noted writer-director Steve Rosenbaum.

A documentary film producer and web developer, Mr. Rosenbaum has been chronicling the goings on at Ground Zero since the day the Towers fell. Shortly after 9/11, he placed an ad in the Village Voice asking for photos and videos documenting the event. He eventually assembled a collection of some 500 hours of footage, which became the CameraPlanet archive. Some of the best material wound up in his 2002 documentary, 7 Days in September, which the Times called “almost unbearably powerful.” Mr. Rosenbaum rightly points out, “If you watch it, there are things in the film that I protected, images and stories that were never going to be seen by my children’s children if I hadn’t rescued them.”

As for the new project, while it includes a few chilling clips of the attacks, it is largely concerned with the creation of Michael Arad’s memorial and the 9/11 Museum. (Click through the slideshow for a selection of highlights.)

Mr. Rosenbaum said he decided to make the material iPad-only because it was simply the best device on which to display it. “I wanted it to be more of an immersive experience,” he said. “The nature of the photographs are so powerful, so to render them in anything but full color seemed wrong to me. And I didn’t want it to be viewed on a phone. I wanted it to be big and glossy.”

Apple apparently liked the idea. Mr. Rosenbaum—who runs the tech company Magnify.net, a “realtime video curation engine,” and is the author of the recent book Curation Nation—explained that he submitted his app last week expecting it to take several weeks to get through the company’s notoriously opaque vetting system. “It got approved in a day and a half,” he said. The app was developed with Magnify.net video technology and programed by Jeff Soto of the Brooklyn-based mobile development shop TENDIGI.

He’s hoping for some significant promotion in the app store, since apps that aren’t featured can easily be overlooked, but he noted that there are no guarantees. “I’ve asked around, and apparently they have a bunch of people that have a meeting every week on Thursday or Friday, and they pitch. But it’s a closed system. They may choose it and they may not.”

Mr. Rosenbaum was asked whether making the app exclusive to the iPad isn't too limiting for a project with resonance among so many Americans, many of whom either can’t afford the device or have somehow resisted Steve Jobs’ shiny vision.

“The iPad is the single fastest selling consumer device in the history of consumer electronics,” he said. “There are 30 million now on the market. What’s more limited? A beautiful glossy photo book that sits in Barnes & Noble, or something that’s free and on a device that lots of people have?”

Mr. Dadich

Not long after Scott Dadich was appointed executive editor of digital magazine development for all of Condé Nast, “the tops of the mastheads,” as the senior editorial staffs are called, filed into the company’s fourth-floor lecture hall for a series of meetings. Condé’s new iPad king was holding court.

This wasn’t the first time the tastemakers of 4 Times Square had met Mr. Dadich. He’d been shopping “that Wired thing” around the company since it debuted in iTunes’ App Store in May 2010 to considerable fanfare and a flurry of downloads.

But this time, Mr. Dadich faced a few more sets of crossed arms.

Mr. Dadich’s coronation, in August 2010, had come with a big window office on the seventh floor and a mandate to lead the brands that Si Newhouse built into the brave new world of the tablet, a device so shiny and elegant it made Condé’s stable of glossies look dull by comparison. Not surprisingly, Mr. Dadich’s arrival also brought a share of resentment his way in no small part because, even in the pages of this paper, his ascent from Wired, where he had spun a lagging title into ASME gold as creative director, was presented in near-messianic terms.

In a profile of Mr. Dadich in The Observer last August, Evan Smith, his former boss at Texas Monthly, likened Mr. Dadich to a “combination of Jesus and Pelé” before deciding, a moment later, that a comparison to Miles Davis and Frank Lloyd Wright was more apt. Legendary Esquire art director George Lois was, if possible, even more effusive about Condé’s new It Boy, declaring, “With a talent like Scott, magazines will never die.”

Within 4 Times Square, such praise was met with a degree of skepticism, but the breathless optimism among the Condé kingmakers who backed Mr. Dadich was to be expected. It’s hard to find a print dinosaur that doesn’t drool a little, post-recession, over the possibility of wading into a teeming new revenue stream. But Condé Nast felt the pressure more acutely than most. Mr. Newhouse’s puritanical if lavish stewardship of his beloved titles had left the company playing a careful game of wait-and-see through roughly the first three-quarters of the Internet revolution.

Condé’s initial flirtations with the web had been coy and tentative. Rather than sully established titles like Gourmet and Vogue, the company launched new sites, including Epicurious.com and Style.com, as a way of protecting its spoiled progeny from the rough-and-tumble Internet.

While Condé Nast was far from the only media company to find its established business model upended by the web, it appeared to be more paralyzed than most by the shift, perhaps because, in some ways, the rules of online media ran counter to the entire culture of the company. Where Condé Nast had been built on the notion of exclusivity—the idea that its gatekeepers held the keys to a sort of private club, doling out access to readers one glamorous photo spread or finely-turned phrase at a time—the Internet was messy, democratic and fundamentally untamable. Marquee titles like Vanity Fair, Vogue and the New Yorker seemed obsessed with hierarchies. The web obliterated them. Mr. Newhouse’s painstakingly constructed and assiduously policed royal court had come under threat—the villagers were massing at the gates!—and the ambivalence within the company was apparent: every attempt to welcome in the hoi polloi was met with an opposing impulse to head for higher ground on the castle wall.

Former web editors are still baffled by budgets that allowed for a suite to cover the Oscar party at Morton’s but can’t seem to assign to an extra desk for an online editor. Permission was required from the tech side before any print content was posted online. Nine months could crawl by before a request for an RSS feed or comment system on a site made its way through the system. Up until a few years ago, editorial staffers were shackled to a bloated corporate content management system that “forces web editors to spend enormous amounts of time wrangling the system instead of creating content,” according to one insider.

When individual titles began make their own forays into the web, they did so gingerly, slapping up what seemed to be placeholder sites geared mostly to picking up subscriptions. Meanwhile, rivals were popping up everywhere. “The biggest shame was that Vogue wasn’t Net-a-porter,” a former Condé Nast print editor told The Observer. “That was the missed opportunity of the century.”

The iPad, then, promised more than just a do-over. It was a chance for redemption. See what we did there? We’re not extinct! And for all his technical wizardry, Steve Jobs seemed a worthy partner, with his refined aesthetic and affinity for gated communities not unlike the neighborhood Condé Nast had occupied for years. The iPad seemed to promise that, both financially and culturally, the company could resort to its comfy old habits and maybe still survive.

Condé Nast’s digital efforts have been restructured so many times, it’s hard to keep the chronology straight. But call it CondéNet or Condé Nast Digital—as the digital arm has been named at various times—in some ways, it’s the same as it ever was.

IN THE FOURTH FLOOR conference room, Mr. Dadich preached his new gospel with the relentless enthusiasm of a mystical prophet. His crystal ball was showing nothing but iPad. Sales projections for Apple’s magic screenwere thrown around with exuberance. Here’s what we’re doing. Here’s our future.

All that sounded promising enough. But there was a catch: there would be no dedicated hires. Instead, existing art and production staffers from the print side would be responsible for making two iPad layouts (one in portrait and one in landscape, per Mr. Dadich’s vision) on Adobe’s platform. The idea was that since Condé Nast used Adobe’s InDesign and InCopy software to create its magazines, sticking with Adobe would make repurposing content easier. Based in Silicon Valley, Adobe had seen where the business was heading and was building software to get into the tablet game. In fact, the first Wired app was built with a lot of Adobe manpower and then rebuilt when Apple banned the Flash system Adobe had been using from the iPad.

Despite the setbacks Wired had encountered, Mr. Dadich made it all sound simple. “What we’re going to do is have workflow specialists come in, so it’ll be actually less work,” a source recalls him saying.

“I think that’s a terrible idea,” says Khoi Vinh, former NYTimes.com design director and author of the highly regarded design blog Subtraction. (A sign of Mr. Vinh’s influence: he boasts 210,267 Twitter followers to Mr. Dadich’s 3,155.) Mr. Vinh is highly critical of Condé’s print-centric, “magazine replica” approach to the tablet. “It’s like going to a Broadway stage crew, who are very talented at what they’re doing, and saying, ‘Can you help us create the next summer movie blockbuster?’” he told The Observer, adding, “I think it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the way design works.”

Wall Street Journal director of design technology Erin Sparling felt the same way about retasking print folks to design for the iPads simply because they had used Adobe programs before. “That’s crazy,” Mr. Sparling told The Observer. “The assumption that it’s the same thing, just with a different output, is absolutely wrong. Just tacking it onto employees’ responsibilities seems like a recipe for making all of those employees very sad.”

It’s certainly been a culture shock. Some sources say art departments at titles like Vanity Fair, Glamour, GQ and Allure have had to give up their coveted down weeks between issues—time they once spent visiting museums and dreaming up gorgeous new layouts—in favor of working late on weeknights and weekends to produce pages in Adobe. They’re worried that burnout will turn to a morale problem, if not the makings of a full-scale mutiny.

Two talented digital designers, Chris Gonzalez, director of mobile product management at Condé Nast, and Vince Holleran, who helped create the New Yorker’s iPad app, both recently departed for Gilt Groupe. Anton Ioukhnovets, a former GQ art director, left the magazine last September after seven years for reasons unrelated to the iPad. Nonetheless, he said, “I saw it coming, and I was not interested. I didn’t want to do two jobs for the for the price of one.” He called the iPad “the bane” of his former colleagues’ existence.

In a statement emailed to The Observer, Condé president Bob Sauerberg, said, “From the start, we recognized both the opportunities and the inherent challenges of a new technology and medium. We have been aggressive in our digital development and we know the path to success can be bumpy. We believe in the talents and of our editorial teams to create their own apps—entrusting the design to those who have built our magazines. We are gratified with the way consumers are responding and we are extremely proud of what our teams have accomplished.”

While Condé swells with pride, there’s another aspect of its iPad initiative that baffles outsiders. Why lock in a partnership with Adobe while the market is still shaking out? “You don’t do a biz dev deal to get on the iPad! You just do an app,” said a source familiar with Condé’s digital operations.

“We, like our colleagues across the industry, are collectively inventing a new medium,” Wired’s editor-in-chief Chris Anderson said in another statement emailed to The Observer. “This is an exciting opportunity and our designers both want and deserve to be part of it. Designers come to Wired to innovate; this has the potential to be the most innovative thing we’ve done.”

That said, the transition might be a more natural one for Wired and its gadget-fiend readers. The latest unaudited numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulation show Wired’s digital downloads capping at an average of 27,369 per month for the six months ending this past December. (For context, its first iPad App got more than 100,000 that month.) GQ’s app has less than half of that, with an average of 12,377 per month for those same six months, and Vanity Fair clocked in at just 9,438. Glamour’s iPad app, which was released in August, had a mere 2,471  monthly average for downloads. Condé seems buoyant about new circulation numbers coming out in August, pointing out that The New Yorker was the top grossing app in the App Store for most of the week after introducing a subscription offer.

Meanwhile, the numbers for the Nook, which requires little more effort than uploading PDFs of pages, are surging, and in some cases surpassing iPad sales.

In addition to dipping a toe into the Nook, Condé Nast is sniffing around Hewlett-Packard’s tablet. In April, AdAge reported that it hit the brakes on plans to deliver iPad editions across all its titles, saying they now need justification before launching an iPad edition. But the rhetoric of redemption remains. In a recent interview for Nieman Journalism Labs, Mr. Dadich was still backing the iTunes newsstand and the “dedicated container” for content that an app provides on an iPad, “where covers are the primary means of purchase and browsing.” To which one commenter replied, “All I see when reading this is an entire organization screaming, ‘WE WANT IT TO BE THE EIGHTIES GODDAMMIT.’”

AFTER THE RUDE AWAKENING of the recession, Condé Nast faced a turning point. It was clear the old model—concentrating on publishing elegant and high-end content and assuming that advertisers would line up for pages—was failing. Mr. Newhouse, who is in his 80s and has never been much for innovation, began increasingly to take a back seat, sources say, leaving a something of a power vacuum at the top of the company.

During the McKinsey era, when the white-shoe consultancy was paid seven figures to help turn things around, Condé Nast’s then-CEO and president, Chuck Townsend, was ready to ask for help. He created a ideas box—grandly named “The Power of Suggestion”—and invited any Condé employee with an idea to benefit the company to submit it. The best idea would be selected once each quarter, and the employee would be awarded a $10,000 bonus. But why, some wondered, would anyone with a truly disruptive idea give it away for $10,000 when they could walk to the Flatiron and get half a million in funding?

Later that year, Mr. Townsend handed over the president’s role to Bob Sauerberg, former group president of consumer marketing. That left Mr. Townsend (an operations-side suit), Mr. Sauerberg (a consumer marketing guy steeped in the world of blow cards and direct mail) and editorial director Tom Wallace (former editor-in-chief of Condé Nast Traveler), as the decision-makers charged with leading Condé to its digital destiny.

Though all had mastered various ins and outs of the print magazine business, at least as it was practiced in the last century, none were digital natives, and the mobile world was even more foreign. “These are not guys with iPhones in their pockets checking-in on Foursquare,” noted one insider.

It wasn’t a surprise, then, that the young Mr Dadich was viewed as something of a savior. “You know what it’s like,” a former employee told The Observer, regarding Mr. Dadich. “You sit in a room, and you don’t know much about a subject, but some person is able to discourse in it. All of a sudden someone says, ‘Wow this guy must be incredible!’ They’re anointed as the new king.”

And minting stars is what Condé Nast has always done best—from promising young designers selected as Anna Wintour’s favorites and aggressively promoted in the pages of Vogue, to internal staffers who find themselves propelled up the masthead. It’s the same model Condé used to promote James Truman, known as the “prince of Condé Nast,” to become the company’s second-ever editorial director.

“But,” the source was quick to point out, “just as in every royal family, the king has a certain time when he’s being fawned over, and then there will be a moment when someone chops off his head.”

It doesn’t appear likely that Mr. Dadich is on his way to the guillotine. But there are certainly those ready to plot a coup. Condé Nast employees described Mr. Dadich as “Tom’s boy,” and wonder if Mr. Wallace, the company’s editorial director, hasn’t developed something of a “mancrush” on his young protege. Many of the sources who spoke to The Observer wondered why, in a city suddenly teeming with venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and coders, a print guy like Mr. Dadich was picked to lead the way in the first place. One told The Observer that, last year, even Adobe requested a different point person better versed in interactive design. But that didn’t stop Condé from flying Mr. Dadich, who didn’t respond directly to an interview request, to Moscow a few months ago to deliver his spiel to the company’s Russian titles.

One source we spoke to said Mr. Sauerberg was busily trying to counter Mr. Wallace’s unwavering faith in Mr. Dadich, a relationship backed by Mr. Townsend. Then again, we heard some staffers blame Mr. Sauerberg for the seemingly short-sighted decision to partner with Adobe, while others pinned it on Mr. Townsend. Whichever view is closer to the truth may be less meaningful, in the long run, than the impression of a company on the edge of obsolescence increasingly falling victim to finger-pointing and internal power struggles.

It is, according to a Wired designer speaking from the magazine's headquarters out in San Francisco, a “snake pit.”

Still, there are signs that things may be changing. A few weeks into Mr. Sauerberg’s tenure, he tapped an unglamorous outsider, Joe Simon, an Indian expat from Viacom, to be the company’s first-ever CTO. It was a move toward what one source called “the way every other sane company in the world works.”

Mr. Simon’s biggest challenge might be finding a way to move beyond the Adobe partnership and a mind-set that looks at the iPad and sees a newsstand, but with virtual stacks of print.

“It’s obvious it wasn’t going to work,” said Mr. Vinh, the former NYTimes.com design director. “It’s only if you’re under the spell of this very traditional print-centric bias that you would ever think that this would work. I don’t know who the executive was that said this is the way we’re going to approach it, but this is not a decision that I would put on my résumé.”

ntiku@observer.com

The Observer was the first to report, back in November, that the staff of the iPad app was working with "a journalistic secret weapon," the Parrot AR.Drone quadricopter, also known as "The Flying Video Game." Now they're finally putting the thing to use, with a new feature called "Daily Drone." 

And just to clarify, "drone" refers to the unmanned chopper itself, not the announcer's rather dry intonation. 

Previously: NewsCorp.'s iPad 'Daily' to Use Drone Choppers for News Gathering?

Peter Kafka writes this morning that The Daily will be headed to Android tablets as soon as this spring. This move was expected,"But I’m still a bit surprised to see the move to Google come this early, given the emphasis that News Corp. had placed on its Apple relationship prior to launch earlier this month," wrote Kafka. 

In fact, at the launch event for The Daily, Murdoch said that, "We think last year, this year, and next year will belong to the iPad.” Guess Apple will have to learn how to share. 

Kafka also drops the nugget that subscriptions are ahead of expecations so far, so it will be fun to see if that changes when the free trial period ends this week. 

As The Observer reported earlier this week, News Corp. opted to go outside of Apple for premium advertising, choosing NYC's Medialets istead, but has been relying on Apple for continuing technical support as it gets The Daily off the ground. 

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

But when it came to the advertising that would be featured in The Daily, the logical choice for ad placement, Apple's iAd, lost out to the New York start-up Medialets, which provides a similar service with a few key differences. Medialets provides the technical platform for publishers and agencies to collaborate on creating rich media advertising, and instead of taking a percentage of the ad revenue for apps — which is Apple's model, to the tune of 40 percent — they get a small ad-serving fee each time the spot is shown.

"As Apple continues to expand its boundaries into the core parts of many publisher's business, there is a growing opportunity for alternatives," says CEO Eric Litman. "From a technical perspective iAd is very compelling, but in terms of business, it just doesn't fit with the way publishers think about the world." 

Founded in 2008, Medialets has since signed on over 100 top media players, including The New York Times, WSJ, CondeNast, Hearst, NY Mag and CBS.

"The entire industry was using Flash, and then the iPad came along and didn't support that, so everyone had to scramble to figure out what the best new tool was," says Marc Frons, who runs the technology group at the NY Times. "Medialets has emerged as a new leader."

Medialets shares detailed campaign reports with publishers and agencies, while Apple has increasingly cut publishers off from user data. And because Medialets relies on HTML5, publishers don't have to worry about Apple versus Android verus RIM. "Advertisers don't want to think about devices, they want to think about audiences," says Litman.

These competitive advantages are showing up in the bottom line. Medialets' premium inventory across iPhone, iPad and Android devices increased nearly 300% in fourth quarter of 2010. To keep up, the company has expanded from five original employees in 2008, to 55 today. 

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

But just one day after the launch of The Daily a Tumblr has appeared, The Daily: Indexed, with links to all the paper's free content. 

As this Tumblr points out, there are still some items which can't be accessed without purchasing the iPad app, "If you like these articles, go subscribe." 

It's a nice gesture, but as it turns out, this page is intended to test the legal limits of sharing content. It's created by Andy Baio, a programmer and journalist from L.A.

"Frankly, I'm also very curious about the legal implications. My understanding is that linking to public news articles is unquestionably legal, and I believe that right should never be discouraged. It's also worth noting that Google's slowly indexing all the articles too, and search engines aren't blocked in their robots.txt file. But I'm still recovering from a legal nightmare last year (more on that soon), so if asked to stop publishing and delete the Tumblr, I will. (Lawyers: My email address is at the top of this page.) In the meantime, enjoy!"

No worries Andy, News Corp. knew this would happen. It's cool.

UPDATE: Baio emailed The Observer to say, "I love that this kind of experimentation is happening with journalism. I love journalism dearly and want to see new models emerge, and charging for content is a great way to align a media organization's interests with those of its readership. That said, if you do charge for access, you can't publish free versions to the web and hope that people don't find them."

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

Honeycomb seems stable, smooth, and elegant--a big step up for the OS. Google is making a really smart move in not trying to copy the iOS tablet interface (which is in itself a zoomed-in mobile phone interface) and rather has been focusing on incredibly rich widgets, notifications, and context-sensitive navigation bars. 

So Google has a mature or near-mature tablet OS. What now? The iPad, and the rumored next-gen iPad have a huge head start. How can Google compete with thousands of native apps, rock-solid software, an enormous installed user base, beautiful retail locations? The answer isn't clear, but if history is any indication, the search giant isn't going to go head to head with Apple.

The tablet shown at Google today wasn't a Google-branded device, but a Motorola Xoom, which will most likely be sold in cell phone stores when it launches. Apple's strategy has been to release a single magical piece of new technology; a mature device creates a new market. Android has been playing the role of the fast follower, and it seems like Google will retain that role for now. The advantage that Google has is that it can rely on a team of companies to release tablet after tablet while the company continually upgrades Honeycomb until it hits on a killer combination that makes an Android tablet something that you might want over an iPad.

With Android phones, it took almost three years for that killer combo to emerge. And even if, by some miracle, the first Android tablets are as good as the iPad, these devices compete on apps. The iOS app store is a mature platform with a huge number of apps, many of which are natively written for the larger screen of the iPad. The Android market is flooded with a tremendous number of buggy apps, none of which are written for Honeycomb.

While Google says that any app written for Froyo or Gingerbread will work great on Honeycomb, anyone who has used iPhone apps blown up on an iPad screen will tell you that a good tablet app is much more than an enlarged mobile app. At its conference, Google showed 15 applications natively running on Honeycomb tablets. At the end of the conference the company promised 50 apps at its next event, but that's still just a fraction of Apple's offerings. 

So will the Google tablet follow in the footsteps of the Android phone, transitioning from scrappy upstart to the No. 1 selling smartphone OS? Google has been able to put a dent into the iPhone's dominance by flooding the market with hundreds of Android phones, from the inexpensive and feature-light to the flagship uberphones. But that approach will work less well in the tablet market.

A phone is a multifunction device, but generally it is used in a very utilitarian way: to make calls, to get information, to send messages, to check in. It doesn't really matter if the experience of using the phone is pleasurable. Many Android phones are bare and functional. They get the job done, and at the end of the the day that is all that matters. A tablet, however, is all about the experience. A tablet needs to be elegant. Using an iPad is a pleasurable experience, and that pleasure is a huge part of the iPad's cachet. If Honeycomb tablets start flooding the market with the usual Android growing pains--not enough memory, choppy animation because of slow processors, crashes, bad battery life--then Google may shoot its chances of success in the foot. No doubt eventually a truly great Android tablet will hit the market, but when it does, it may be lost among dozens of similar tablets that no one wants.