Can the slick new Fairfax apps for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald save the newspaper journalism business model? That’s the question, and it is a question worth asking, because the new platforms, as I wrote earlier this week, are the high water mark of mobile device applications for news organisations in Australia so far.

We all want to wish them well. But I’m afraid that informed industry opinion is that while the apps are truly lovely, there is not much of a prospect for renewed rivers of gold. It’s more a trickle of cents, and not enough to sustain large journalistic staff numbers.

I talked to one of the lead developers, Fairfax’s Steve Hutcheon, yesterday. He is not giving anything away on download numbers so far, other than to say they are well in excess of expectations.

But here is a set of predictions by an industry source with hard experience in newspaper mobile tablet apps. He predicts Fairfax will get between 20,000 and 30,000 downloads of the new apps over the six months during which the applications are free. Not all of these people will remain active users. That will probably settle at around 35,000.

Then, in January, those users will have to pay $8.99 a month to keep using the app. At that point, my pessimistic source predicts, there will be formidable churn, and the numbers will settle down to somewhere between 5000 and 10,000 paying customers (which, I would point out, is less than the numbers that subscribe to the Crikey email.)  Those numbers seem very low to me, perhaps too gloomy by half. But if they prove correct, or even close to correct, then  the iPad edition becomes niche media, not mass media.

Fairfax will at this stage introduce innovations designed to minimise the churn, my source predicts. A version two will be launched. My source doubts that this will greatly alter the picture.

Meanwhile, the competitors will have caught up, so the pressure will be to add new bells and whistles to stay at the head of the game. This will be difficult because the apps are built on a propriety system. The pressure will be to turn to a commercial developer that will wrap upgrades into the package. But all that means expense, and stuff that anyone else can buy, too.

The picture, my source predicts, is that each app will gross about $1 million a year. Thirty per cent of that goes to Apple. Deduct staff and other costs, and the profit is looking lean, and certainly not transformative of business models.

Add to that any money made from selling the advertisements — but that will be limited by the numbers. If those numbers are as low as my gloomy source predicts, then you are left with  a trickle of dollars and a tidy little business. But that’s all. It’s a niche media business, and you are still left looking elsewhere (where?) for the money to sustain your big time journalistic effort.

On the other hand, if at the same time, or at some time in the near future, hard copy publishing ceases Monday to Friday, then you are also saving the massive costs of printing on dead trees and trucking them around the country.

Of course, it may be that Fairfax plans something entirely new and different at the point the paywalls go up. News Limited too, since they are about to make announcements of this sort.

It may be that someone has put a lot of thought and research into what people will be prepared to pay for. Tightly targeted packages of media content, bundled with other goodies, for example, with the price of a subscription really being the entry to a sort of exclusive club. That’s the arrangement predicted by Mark Day more than 18 months ago.

It may even be that people are thinking of new ways of doing journalism, and things that people might pay for, or that might attract engaged audiences in sufficient numbers to attract advertisers.

But I am sad to report that I am not hearing any rumbles of this kind of thinking going on inside either News Limited or Fairfax.

Before I go further, I should point out a few things that I was not aware of or missed in my earlier review of the new apps. First, I said it was not possible to comment on stories. That is true — unless you choose to register with Fairfax by providing your email address. Once you have done that, commenting on many stories is possible, though it’s a clunky dialogue compared to what you can do on the average blog or Twitter.

Second, there are some experiments with rudimentary interactive graphics. Clearly this kind of thing will continue to get better. Lastly, Sudoku is there now. I sat up in bed playing it last night. It’s great.

As is the app as a whole. I love it the more I use it. But change the fundamental outlook? I wish, truly wish,  I could be more positive.