It has become common wisdom in the tech world that old media represents an obsolete mode of thinking that should be discarded as quickly as possible. The attitude to physical, broadcast or film media could generally be summed up by saying “Newspapers? Print books? Those things are ancient and of no use to anyone ever, amirite?” But those with a little more patience and scope know that isn’t entirely true. Media is an enterprise that forms a core part of modern societies, and digital media is but a few years old. So maybe there are still some lessons that old media has to teach those young upstart digiphiles….

That, I freely admit, is a controversial title. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make it any less true. While there is always chatter online about what the web will or won’t do to ‘old media’, a couple of recent developments have popped up this week: first, that News Corp (the same people who run Fox and The Wall Street Journal) may launch a tablet-only ‘publication’; and secondly, a report (pdf link) by Next Issue Media that suggests that, if magazines expand beyond the iPad, they’ll rake in about $3 billion by 2014. What’s  more, the same study said that consumers actually don’t mind paying near print…

Earlier this week, the New York Times company forced the iPad Pulse News Reader app to be pulled from the App Store. The reason? It took the Times’ RSS feed and put it inside its own app. To be clear, the RSS feed in question was a headline, a one-sentence introduction and a link to the full story on the NYT site. That’s it. Worse? Steve Jobs highlighted the app earlier during his WWDC keynote – and the NYT itself wrote a glowing review of the app just a few days before. As mystifying as the move seems from the outside, it’s yet another sign that established old media entities are still really struggling to…