The buzz in  the industry is that Fairfax Media is about to launch its much promised “native” iPad apps for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age — possibly before the end of this month.

Those who have seen the product say it is good, and the competition at News Limited acknowledges that it expects it to be better than the app presently in use at The Australian, or anything else on the Australian market so far.

But what difference will it make to the economics? One of the quickest reverses in media thinking has occurred over the past six months. Just last November, media executives from News Limited and Fairfax were proclaiming iPads as the saviours of the newspaper business model.

People would be prepared to pay for news content delivered to the “cool new toy”, they said. Advertisers would pay a premium. The problem of collapsing business models would be solved.

Well, nobody is saying that now. The rumble in the industry is that subscriptions to the existing iPad apps are underwhelming. People signed up to the free trial offers, but most did not return. This echoes the experience in the US.

Mobile devices are obviously important, and news organisations have to deliver to them. But they are not saviours. They alter little about the underlying problems.

The figures on usage also suggest that people are not using iPads primarily to consume video and news content on the move, as expected, but rather as a leisure device in the evenings, while watching television or reading in bed.

As News Corporation’s chief digital officer, Jon Miller, said at the launch of The Daily in New York, on the iPad news organisations have to compete not only against each other, but also against Angry Birds.

Meanwhile, News Limited editors are saying that they are reorganising their news operations around the idea of having different versions of their mastheads on different platforms.

The concept was described by the editor of The Courier Mail, Michael Crutcher, at an event where I was also speaking at the Queensland University of Technology last Friday.

Crutcher told the gathering that The Courier Mail newsroom would soon be reorganised with desk editors overseeing areas of speciality, and able to make more decisions about how content was treated.

This was because there would soon be several different Courier Mails, each with different imperatives: the traditional print version, the free website, a website that would be behind a paywall, and an edition for delivery to mobile devices.

Similar thinking — responding to the different ways people use their news services at different times of the week — is behind moves at The Age to have different editors for the weekday, Saturday and Sunday editions.

News Limited has, of course, been promising that paywalls would be erected around part of its content for quite a while now, but we have yet to see it happen.

Crutcher was not able to enlighten us on dates, nor on what kind of content subscribers might be asked to pay for. But News Limited newsrooms are, apparently, ready to move to put up the paywalls at short notice.

It would be fascinating to be a fly on the wall at the discussions within media organisations about paywalls. The Murdoch experiment in England with The Times and The Sunday Times is, according to some commentators’ back-of-the-envelope calculations, not yet netting sufficient revenue to make up for lost hard copy circulation.

And the more sophisticated New York Times model, which has “porous” walls to allow in social media links and traffic from search engines, is putting out discount offers to drive up numbers.

It is too soon to proclaim either of these experiments a success or a failure.