Murdoch's continence pad

Doesn't apply to me: I've spent the day masturbating over news footage of refugee orphans

Everyone wants an iPad - you can even sell them by writing stupid headlines like this.

I don't know if you've noticed, but when you open any newspaper at the moment 99% of the advertising looks like the above. Picture of gizmo, headline, price.

I'd say this was a symptom of the  panic that's gripping advertising now that more and more of the things we sell don't really exist. The iPad has a special place as a fetish object that mediates between the consumer and the spirit world of the internet. Consumers like them because it's a hard object that they that can cling on to as their personality and wordly possessions evaporate into cyberspace.

Rupert Murdoch wants you to buy an iPad, so you can download his newspaper The Daily. The Guardian ran the launch story with the headline 'The future of news or dead on arrival?' which I think may be rather wishful thinking on their part.

Murdoch gives the killer angle on The Daily, the one you'd probably only get from a newspaper owner: 'No paper, no mutil-million dollar presses, no trucks.' As John Lanchester pointed out in this very interesting article in the LRB, the things that costs loads of money are the physical logistics of printing a newspaper. In fact, according to Lanchester, if the New York Times were to abandon its presses it would have enough spare cash to give all of its readers a Kindle, twice.

What Murdoch has always been good at doing is selling the same stuff for more money. His media empire is based on a subscription model - Sky sells you the same kind of stuff that you can get for free, with ads, and for money.

He does this, in the case of Sky, using a combination of exclusive content and advertising. That's really the winning combo.