The survey, which AdWeek calls “one of the first deep dives into how people are consuming news content on the eight-month-old device,” said that most heavy users of the tablet have or will drop their print subscriptions.

“These findings are encouraging for newspaper publishers who plan to begin charging for subscriptions on their iPad app editions early next year, but our survey also found a potential downside: iPad news apps may diminish newspaper print subscriptions in 2011,” said Roger Fidler, RJI’s program director for digital publishing.

The survey contacted more than 1,600 iPad users online from September to November. It found that “58 percent of respondents who use the Apple tablet at least an hour a day for news are very likely to cancel their subscription in the next six months. One in 10 said they had already done so.”

Another survey, by GfK MRI, found about 4 percent of adults read newspapers or magazines via apps or mobile devices.

Lionel Barber, editor of Financial Times, at a meeting organized by the Confederation of Indian Industry in Mumbai on Tuesday said flexibility and adaptability are key to newspapers’ survival.

“Today, newspapers cannot stay confined to the print medium, Barber said, according to Sify News. “Journalists will have to be willing to create more value, and newspaper managements will have to be flexible in terms of the content platform. After the Web, it was the iPad [that] FT tapped into. And in the last three and a half months, we have had half a million downloads of the application.”

Meanwhile, Keith Weed, Unilever’s chief marketing and communications officer, told Media Week at the Media Guardian Changing Advertising Summit on Tuesday,  “iPads will save newspapers, they really will.”

Marketing magazine says Weed added: “The sort of guys I hang out with, the iPad idiots, we’re all on them… I used to have a pile of newspapers in the morning but now I flick through my iPad.”

“In addition to the newspaper apps for sites such as the Financial Times, globetrotter Weed cited the restaurant guide and booking service Zagat to Go, and the airline apps, as among his favorites and most used.”

And, indeed, sales of the iPad have pushed Apple’s stock to record highs, according to the Associated Press.

“Apple’s iPad is setting the standards for this generation of tablet computers as competitors scramble to match the design and functions,” the AP says. “So far, no credible challengers have hit the market.

“In the first quarter it was available, Apple sold 3.3 million iPads. That’s about three times the number of iPhones sold in the first full quarter the smart phones were on sale in 2007. … Analysts’ estimates for iPad unit sales in 2011 are in flux, with those on the conservative end putting the number around 20 million while more bullish forecasters say it could be 50 million.”

In 2001, Apple spent $28.5 million advertising the iPod alone or together with iTunes, the magazine says. In 2007, the company spent $16.6 million on ads to introduce the iPhone.

In both campaigns, most money went to network TV followed by consumer magazines then cable TV, and “spot TV, business-to-business magazines and newspapers divided up the slivers.”