Szabolcs Toth

• Position: Editor, weekend supplement of Hungarian daily Magyar Nemzet
• Dates of Fellowship: Hilary Term 2012
• Sponsor: Wincott Foundation

Szabolcs Tohotom Toth has edited the weekend magazine of the Hungarian national Magyar Nemzet for more than 11 years, first as a co-editor, then later on as editor. The magazine is published every Saturday as a supplement to the newspaper on twenty broadsheet pages. It contains feature stories, essays, analysis pieces and backgrounders, Q&A interviews, opinion articles, book and music reviews and a comic strip too.

During the last 11 years at Magyar Nemzet Szabolcs has also worked as a journalist and, later on, as a senior writer. He was an Alfred Friendly fellow in 2003 and worked in Boston during his tenure there as a reporter for the Boston Globe.

Szabolcs’ former employers include: Napi Magyarorszag (Hungarian daily); Budapest Weekly (Budapest based English language weekly), both of which are now defunct (Szabolcs claims it is not because of his contribution there); Blikk (Hungarian tabloid, still prospering).

He is also the writer of a new book intended for those studying journalism at universities and news writing classes. The book was published last October in Budapest, and has a Hungarian language blog site – elsoleutes.hu – designed and maintained by the author.

Szabolcs is also interested in news and art photography: from time to time he struggles with his own digital camera to produce photos of somewhat tolerable quality.

Research Topic

Touchscreen Wars – Public companies and the private efforts to re-monetize news production on mobile platforms 

In 2010 the Apple iPad was launched, and it triggered the “internet tab” revolution: a myriad of Android tabs have followed, while the new versions of Amazon's book reader, the Kindle has also been an unprecedented success so far. 

On these devices there are already well-functioning content payment schemes in place (App Store, Android Market, Amazon), so with tens of millions of readers migrating to these new mobile platforms, publishers and news outlets are eager to follow them.

But will their eagerness bring in the big bucks in the long run?

They might well face the public news company as a heavy-weight competitor. My research paper concentrates on how state players, both in the UK and Hungary, can undermine the pay model of these platforms with their willingness to go free with their own mobile apps.