Time Inc., the country's largest magazine publisher, has reached a deal with Apple Inc. (AAPL) to make all its iPad editions free for print subscribers, marking a break in the impasse between publishers and Apple and lending support to Time's contention that it's business-as-usual after the ouster of its chief executive.

Starting Monday, subscribers to Sports Illustrated, Time and Fortune magazines will be able to access the iPad editions via the apps, which will be able to authenticate them as subscribers. Time Inc.'s People magazine already had such an arrangement, but readers of most publications have had to pay separately for the iPad version regardless of their subscriber status.

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Among trends in the media industry, one of the most promising is the increasing readiness of consumers to pay for content, says Marcel Fenez, a Global Entertainment and Media Leader for PricewaterhouseCoopers, in a presentation of many of those trends.

Mr Fenez made his presentation at WAN-IFRA's Publish Asia 2011, being held in Bangkok from 27 to 29 April.

"They are giving us hints about what they want to pay for," he says.

"They're telling us three things - I will pay for convenience, I will obviously pay for quality, because one of the things we know about free content is that very often the quality is not very high, and they're also telling us they'll pay for a higher quality experience," Mr Fenez says.

Regarding the last point, Mr Fenez used the example of someone paying a high price to go to a concert yet illegally downloading music from the internet. "Why will people pay $150 to go to a gig but not pay for music? What they tell us is, it's the enriched experience. Content alone is not enough, it has to be more than that.

"Though content is king, we have to rely on more than just content," he says. "We have to provide convenience, we have to provide quality, and we have to provide the experience."

While newspaper circulation in much of the world declines, it continues to grow in India. And the prospect for future growth is excellent, says Ravi Dhariwal, CEO of Bennet, Coleman & Co., the publisher of The Times of India.

Mr Dhariwal delivered the keynote address at WAN-IFRA's Publish Asia 2011, being held in Bangkok from 27 to 29 April.
India's population continues to grow, as does its literacy rate, so future readership is also likely to increase, he says. Advertising growth also has great potential.

For the Times of India, it's all about brand, he says. The 173-year old paper "tries to capture our country on a particular day and the people's aspirations," he says. We don't consider the Prime Minister or the President as the leaders of India, we treat the reader as the CEO."

In a wide-ranging keynote address that presented a case study of the Times' success, Mr Dhariwal pointed to the following elements that characterizes the Times of India brand:

Mobile advertising is growing fast, but mobile banner ads generally annoy users--which means they don't serve advertisers well and so are doubly bad news for news orgs. But the Spokesman-Review (Spokane, Wa.) has built its own system for creating mobile-friendly ads augmented with useful information for people on the go.

Ryan Pitts, senior editor of digital media for the paper, says these ads are selling better than expected...

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