” otherwise, people can’t share links to your stories and let others discover your paper, and in 2013, reading the news has become a highly-social activity.”
London Times. Has an iPad app. Available on line BUT… If I think X would be interested, AFAIK they won’t be able to access the item (behind a paywall). I think the NYT has got round this somehow and I know the Times (Ldn) are asking if viewers want this (duh!).

Bottom line we want access to, and to be able to share, information. Paywalls et al are just a nuisance.

Thanks for the comment, Dave. The newspaper is a good example: reading it is a high-frequency activity (tall head) when it’s your local paper, and a low-frequency/dispersed (long tail) activity when it’s someone else’s local paper. I’d suggest that in that case, an app is a nice-to-have, but web site (preferably mobile-friendly) remains a need-to-have; otherwise, people can’t share links to your stories and let others discover your paper, and in 2013, reading the news has become a highly-social activity.

I’ll also go off topic from Dave’s comment, and rant about the severely-broken practice of using separate URLs for mobile and desktop (e.g. http://www.somenewspaper.com vs m.somenewspaper.com). If I share the link from my phone, someone reading the article on a laptop at work doesn’t want to be stuck with the mobile UI on a huge screen, and if that person shares the link from work, I don’t want to be stuck with a tiny postage stamp of the 3-column desktop site on my phone. Newspapers: just don’t do that, ever, if you give a sh*t about attracting readers.