The Chicago Tribune's iPad app

I’ve been authorized by a small but committed group of technology journalists who have watched this space closely — and who believe in newspapers, magazines, the internet and their shared future — to deliver this simple message to media companies everywhere.

For the love of God, please stop trying to make your own tablets.

The Tribune Co., owner of the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, the Los Angeles Times and several other newspapers and television stations, is reportedly the latest media giant to be seduced by the sweet siren harmonies of multitouch gestures and brushed aluminum. “More than half a dozen current and former Tribune employees” confessed to CNN that the Tribune’s CEO is smitten with the idea of a tablet of his very own, first requesting “anonymity for fear of losing their jobs or of souring relations with a former employer.”

According to these accounts, the Tribune would like to partner with Samsung to produce a modified Android tablet, even though Samsung already makes a popular and quite capable Android tablet, and the Tribune Co. to date has no tablet-optimized Android apps for its newspapers. (Is any part of this making sense yet?)

Let’s look at the field. Hardware is hard. It’s hard to develop, it’s hard to design, it’s hard to find partners, it’s hard to source parts, it’s hard to build, it’s hard to get working, it’s hard to keep costs down and it’s extraordinarily hard at the end of that process to produce something popular. The great hardware manufacturers of our time, like Sony, Samsung or Apple, are great for a reason. Most companies should count themselves lucky if they ever ship anything at all.

Let’s look at the history.

The Tribune Co.’s experience with hardware manufacturing and skill at software development is worse than every single one of these remarkable failures. And its reported plan to give away Tribune-branded tablets loaded with crippleware is, astonishingly, even worse than Philadelphia Media Network’s plan to subsidize half the purchase price of prefab general-purpose Android tablets.

Do you know what’s a good idea? Giving college kids an Xbox 360 if they buy a new Windows computer. You buy something you need, and you get something you want. Very few people need a newspaper subscription, and even fewer want an off-brand Android tablet.

Maybe the Tribune papers could give away an Xbox. Or an iPad. Or a Kindle, a Nook Color or a Galaxy Tab. These are products that people actually have expressed interest in owning, and for which they might be persuaded to spring for a newspaper subscription. But that would mean giving up control over the device’s details, from the content to the wireless carrier.

The crux of the problem is in this one paragraph from CNN’s story on the Tribune tablet:

[M]any media analysts say the economics of digital publishing on subsidized tablets appears to be sound given the expense of printing newspapers, especially with ever-rising ink prices. But that’s if the advertising revenues from digital platforms can match those on paper, which has not been the case so far.

I’m a futurist. I embrace digital delivery. I believe that a combination of print and digital subscriptions can work for many if not all media companies today. But if major publishers are seriously prepared to blow up their primary revenue stream — print advertising — and slap together a giveaway tablet in order to save money on ink, God help them.