WHEN a drowning man is thrown a lifeline he doesn't usually check to see if it is tethered to anything. And so it was with the media and the first version of the iPad.
The new model might be slimmer, lighter and shinier than the first, but I don't hear the word saviour bandied around in the way that it was at the launch of the original model.
Back then, The New York Times shared the stage with Steve Jobs; this time the only media present were those in the audience.
Since then the early flush of novelty has well and truly worn off, among the media if not Apple's adoring fans.
It's not that the media have given up on it; far from it. Major publishers here and abroad are working on their next iPad offerings, building on the experience of others and their own mistakes, my own publisher, Fairfax Media (owner of The Age), included. A native app for the The Age, to replace the PDF ''smart edition'', is due out soon.
But it's fair to say the media have undergone a reality check.
The magazine sector felt it earlier this year when those titles that had embraced the iPad, namely Wired, Men's Health, GQ and Vanity Fair in the US, announced a fall in downloads of their apps.
The early healthy uptake in subscriptions of newspaper iPad apps in this country has by all accounts been unsustainable. People subscribed, some of them liked it enough to return but unfortunately most did not.
It is too early to say what will come of the first iPad-only daily newspaper, The Daily, launched in early February.
After an initial free trial, it is now charging subscribers just US14¢ a day and is garnering modest reviews.
The only thing certain that can be said about it, other than that it is the boldest attempt yet to reinvent the model for the digital age, is that News Corporation should have opted for a low-key launch rather than the triumphalist show it staged at the Guggenheim in New York.
Aside from the specialists, such as The Wall Street Journal, The Economist and the Financial Times, no mainstream media publisher has yet found cause for celebration.
At the same time, publishers continue to pursue a paywalls strategy for their websites, and do the maths on the price of sacrificing a mass audience for a niche one that pays. This week The Times of London, which erected a solid paywall around its website and that of its sister title, The Sunday Times last year, revealed it had
79,000 new digital subscribers.
Commentators such as Dan Sabbagh of The Guardian challenge News International's assertion that it is ''back in growth''.
His back-of-the-envelope calculation is that those digital subscribers bring in £7.1 million ($A11 million) of revenue a year, which is some way short of the £18.2 million lost from the 60,726 fewer paper sales of last year.
''It is too soon for anybody to be declaring a victory,'' concludes Sabbagh, who, as a former media editor of The Times, speaks with some authority of the inner workings of News International.
This week The New York Times, which erected a more porous paywall last month, launched some cut-price deals to drive take-up: unlimited access to NYTimes.com and its tablet app for $US2.50 a week for six months, a 50 per cent saving. It smacks of desperation.
Everyone in the media, myself included, wants to see some success stories, but at what cost?
