We’ve finally gotten our first look the long-expected Apple tablet, predictably named the iPad. And since I haven’t had a chance to finger and play with one, I reserve the right to change my opinion later. (Actually, nobody gets to see one until April, and none of the reviewers actually has one.) But at this point, I have to say I feel awfully let down.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a really, really cool gadget, and I want one.

But I wanted more than that. I wanted a new pricing and delivery model for books, newspapers and magazines, but we didn’t get much. When we do see those things, I’m sure that visually, they’ll be far more appealing than they are on the stodgy old Kindle and Nook readers. But at what price? I wanted something that would do for news and information what iTunes did for music, but what we got was … iTunes. Huh?

What I saw on the Steve Jobs video was a big iPhone, minus the phone. The price points are still fuzzy, but we know the $500 starting price doesn’t include 3G connectivity. Typically for Apple, you can’t change your own battery (a sore spot with me since my first iPod). It doesn’t have any USB connectivity, a physical keyboard, GPS or a camera. (My Android has all of those. OK, it’s a lot smaller and the keyboard is tiny, but the keys move when I touch them.)

It shows snazzy video — like, uh, all the smart phones already on the market, including the iPhone, Android and Blackberry. And it would be nice if it could output at least 720 HD, but apparently plain old 480 is the best it can do.

And here’s a really neat trick … if you turn it sideways, the screen adapts to a landscape display. Just like the current crop of smart phones. Again, bigger, but nothing new.

Will it kill the current crop of e-readers? I don’t know, but it may not matter. As CNET’s David Carnoy points out, the point of the Kindle, for Amazon, is not to sell hardware but to sell books. And guess what? Amazon already has a Kindle app for the iPhone, and Jobs said all iPhone apps will run on the new iPad. So Amazon’s already there, sharing in whatever spoils exist.

Will iPad succeed? Sure. It’s Apple. They always succeed. It’s cool because it’s Apple and it starts with an “i”. It’s also cool because … well, it’s cool.

But will it really change the media world the way the iPod changed music? I’m not so sure.

The New York Times announced today that it will start charging for online content at the beginning of 2011. The company has settled on a plan that will allow readers to read a limited number of articles each month for free, then require them to pay for more.

The announcement left a lot of questions unanswered, including the number of free articles readers will be allowed to receive, the rate they’ll have to pay for more, and how usage will be measured. They did, however, say that print subscribers will receive free access to online content.

Before we get too excited about this, it’s worth noting that we’ve been here before. The NY Times has tried to charge for content on two previous occasions, the latest being a charge for select op-ed columnists, but they gave up on that in 2007. So the new plan is 11 months off, sketchy, and may or may not work. It’s an important announcement, but not the end of life as we know it.

Keep in mind, too, that the New York Times, like dozens of other newspapers and magazines, is already charging for content, via Amazon’s Kindle e-reader. For $13.99 a month, you can get the whole newspaper on your Kindle. Sure, you can get it free online (for now), but people seem to be willing to pay for the convenience of a wireless subscription.

Which dovetails into the question of whether today’s announcement has anything to do with next week’s rollout of a rumored Apple table/reader. According to a lot of published reports (mostly based on unnamed sources), the Apple announcement will include news of subscription agreements with book, newspaper and magazine publishers.

It’s no secret that a lot of publications are unhappy with Amazon’s terms, feeling that the book giant is taking too big a slice of the pie. An arrangement that makes subscriptions more attractive via the Apple tablet could be a game changer in the same way iTunes was for music. Indeed, the battle over the tablet market may have less to do with hardware than with payment terms.

MediaNews Group – which owns The Denver Post, Oakland Tribune, San Jose Mercury News and Detroit News – has entered a prepackaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy with the intent of turning most of the company over to lenders and getting a fresh start.

Hearst will lose its $300 million investment from 2006, and Bank of America will forgive $765 million in debt in exchange for a nice chunk of the company.

MediaDailyNews has a nice story on the MediaNews bankruptcy filing, as well as an update on Tribune and other bankruptcies.

Editor & Publisher, the venerable trade magazine for the newspaper industry, has resumed operations with a new owner.

The magazine, recently shuttered by Nielsen, was purchased by Duncan McIntosh, whose publications include Boating World, Sea Magazine, America’s Western Boating Magazine, The Log Newspaper, and RishRap News.

The newspaper industry shed nearly 15,000 jobs in 2009, but investors did quite well.

Erica Smith’s Paper Cuts blog, which does the best job in the industry of tracking newspaper job losses, counted 14,845 lost jobs in the newspaper industry during 2009. Keep in mind that her running count includes all jobs, including production and advertising.

On the positive side, stock prices for media companies turned dramatically upward in 2009, reflecting the general trend in the stock market. Rick Edmunds does a nice job of summarizing the results here.

Early entries into the e-reader market space – including those from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony – have focused on books while also accommodating newspapers and magazines. The new Skiff reader, introduced this week, does just the opposite. It has a bigger screen and is designed to make publications more appealing. Unlike the Amazon Kindle and Sony readers, it also has a touch screen. And yes, it’ll read books too.

Amazon’s Kindle has had enough success at selling subscriptions to newspapers and magazines to encourage other hardware makers, but some publishers have expressed displeasure at Kindle’s terms, which give it a hefty chunk of the revenues. More competition in the handheld market for publication subscriptions should result in more favorable terms for publishers.

Unfortunately, the new gadget won’t be available for months. There’s no word as to what it will cost or what terms will be available to publishers for selling their content. So all we really know now

Apple’s winning the tablet PC war just by staying on the sidelines. As long as they don’t show their hole card, nobody can take a poke at whatever they’re planning to roll out into the tablet/e-reader space.

Microsoft, on the other hand, turned everything face up last night, and apparently few people were impressed. One problem is probably that expectations were out of hand. Everyone was expecting to see the dual-screen Courier tablet, but Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that product won’t be ready until later this year. So what we got, instead, was a tablet that PCWorld called “basically a color e-reader running Amazon Kindle software. ” TGDaily.com responded with a “woo bloody hoo.”

I still think that when this new market space finally settles down and we can see who the players are, we’ll get a clearer picture on how media – including newspapers, blogs, magazines and other organizations – will deliver their product. Amazon’s Kindle has pretty much demonstrated that readers will pay a small fee for the convenience of wireless delivery, but there’s no competition yet, and the publications feel Amazon’s taking advantage of them, insisting on too big a slice of the pie.

In his excellent book, The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes a strong case that the changes that really matter come out of nowhere, like a black swan. You can’t predict them. They don’t result from several generations of white swans gradually turning gray until the black one appears. They always catch us by surprise.

That being the case, most forecasts are nothing more than a projection of trends. That virtually ensures that our correct predictions will be mostly useless and the rest will simply be wrong.

So with that buildup, here are my predictions of what we’ll see in 2010 in the world of communications. Just keep in mind that they’re really nothing more than wild ass guesses (WAGs). Here goes, with hopes that nobody drags these out a year from now:

1. Newspapers will stabilize. The drastic cutbacks and bankruptcies are re-creating the newspapers into an entirely different kind of business with much lower overhead. Some major media companies will emerge from Chapter 11 with owners whose investment is a small fraction of the former value.
2. Blogs will grow into serious niche-based news sites, as displaced journalists secure startup capital, assign beats and apply historic professional journalistic standards to the new environment.
3. A major new player will emerge to challenge Twitter as the social medium of choice for broad distribution. We all have to remember that Twitter still doesn’t even have a revenue stream, let alone something resembling profits. Until one appears, its days are numbered.
4. Facebook will settle into a “relationship” medium, as users realize that as currently structured, it has limited value for broad distribution. As increasing numbers of users leave the page itself and access it through third-party applications, it will have to address a problem with lost advertising revenues, just as newspapers are facing.
5. Loyalty to publication titles — already weak — will erode dramatically as readers access the news through aggregators, RSS feeds and handheld applications. This will pose yet another layer of revenue challenges for media, making it more difficult to obtain reliable revenue streams through either subscription or advertising.
6. Handheld devices will emerge as a dominant way in which people receive their news, as iPhones, Blackberries, Android and e-readers pass the desktop in use.
7. Handheld subscriptions — in which readers pay for the convenience of mobile reading — will emerge as a key revenue stream as publications sell subscriptions based on mobile hardware and software platforms.
8. Efforts to charge for online content will fail for live news coverage, because that would require virtual 100 percent cooperation, and media never cooperate on much of anything. They will succeed, however, for proprietary stories such as analysis, columns and investigative reporting.

Amazon made a big deal of the fact that for the first time ever, the company sold more e-books than paper books on Christmas day.

Maybe I’m just being slow, but that doesn’t seem all that impressive to me. After all, who — after opening all their gifts — runs up to the computer and starts ordering paper books?

On the other hand, the first thing I did when I got my Kindle months ago was give it a trial run and purchase a book or two. (A reader’s not much fun unless there’s something on it to read.) I assume that happened a lot on Christmas day when folks opened their new Kindles and immediately started tinkering with them.

But there is one thing Amazon should probably be feeling happy about now: They practically owned the e-reader market for the all-important Christmas season. Barnes & Noble was taking orders, but couldn’t deliver in most cases until mid-January. (An order slip under the tree just doesn’t compare to a slick piece of hardware.)  Plastic Logic won’t introduce its widely anticipated Que reader until January, and we’re still waiting on Apple’s next move.

That means the main competition during the Christmas season was Sony, whose two models still don’t download books wirelessly — a fatal flaw if they don’t fix it in a hurry.

This all means that Amazon may have enough of a head start on the e-reader market to dominate for a good while.

Heartland Publications LLC, which owns 23 dailies and other publications, has filed for Chapter 11 in an agreement that includes giving its largest creditor — GE Credit — a 90% stake in the company.

Heartland owns media properties in Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia.