The Future of New(s)

How Maria Popova Curates Brain Pickings

2013-08-04T09:42:00.003-04:00

Reading back over a stack of old Fast Company magazines I came across this graphic of the criteria Maria Popova uses to select her Brain Pickings.

Every day we face the firehose of information we've directed at ourselves and every day we seek to find the answers we're looking for in that mass of data. Wherever we are in that torrent of stories, we all need a little help. One of the jobs of a journalist is to offer that help, to curate. As Journalists we do what we've done since journalism began. We filter information down and offer up what we think is the most important, for whoever chooses to read it.

What's interesting about the Popova graphic is it recognizes the importance of knowing what your beat is. No one can follow everything, and no one wants you to. You pick your beat, your subject, and so long as you remain the best source of information on that topic, your followers will keep reading.

Popova reads broadly, and then filters by what's important in her beat, and by what fits well in her feeds. She then puts out what she's found and reported in her blog or on twitter, depending on how much time and effort she's put into it. This thoughtful use of the appropriate platform for the content isn't anything new, but it's worth repeating.

Reporters are curating all the time. Curating may be a job in it's own right, but it's also part of what all journalists do, and whether they choose to share that work or not, and where they choose to share it, is a decision for them and their editors.

We're already curating either consciously or unconsciously in our twitter feeds and personal blogs. The question facing editors is whether one of these feeds crosses the threshold of being worthy of its own page in a publication. And perhaps the challenge for journalists is to create a feed that catches their editors' attention.

Flickr Groups Get A Makeover

2013-07-30T22:33:00.000-04:00

Flickr has launched it's newly designed Group pages, bringing them up to speed with the dramatic changes they made in other parts of the site back in May. But is this enough to bring people flocking back to Flickr?

"The new Groups is easier to use, better showcases group photos and discussions" and is easier to navigate and more flexible for admins, says Flickr. And I don't doubt that anyone who's in Flickr and paying their annual fee will love these changes.

But what about people who've moved to Facebook to store their photos? It's hard to imagine them coming back for the Groups function.

So what is the best tool for creating a discussion around photos?

Function Trumps Form On Phones

2013-07-29T14:31:00.002-04:00

He might have found a more charming way to say it, but your own experience surely tells you that Jason Falls is right in this rant: Function Will Always Trump Form With Mobile.

With any new page:

Pages must be responsive from he start, and look good on all platforms.
The mobile display must be simple, clear, linear, and quickly deliver what the user is looking for.

Falls says:

As we all adjust to the mobile-first audience, we’re going to have to come to terms with some new realities. One of those new realities is that function will often trump form.

And if you haven't started adjusting yet: All pages should be responsive, they should know the browser and platform your reader is using and display the page accordingly. No one wants to scroll through the tiny text of a full sized web page crushed onto their phone's small screen.

How do you build into your day, checking how your pages look on mobile devices? Perhaps start by leaving a Safari browser open in developer mode with an iphone page as your user agent. Or drop your page into Google's mobile page tester. You could spend a day a week only looking at your site on your phone.

It's not important how you do it. It's just important that you do regularly look, as a mobile user, at every page your company produces.

Then you'll know what needs your developers' attention.

Count And Cajole - There Must Be A Better Way To Get Reporters Engaged On Twitter

2013-06-14T07:20:00.000-04:00

Ways to encourage reporters in your newsroom to engage in Twitter:

Ask how many new leads reporters found in Twitter this week.
Ask how many story ideas reporters found in Twitter this week.
Ask how many conversations reporters engaged in on Twitter this week.
Count how many times reporters tweet each week.
Count follower growth each month.

To get them started, set some minimum requirements:

Set a goal for minimum number of tweets a week: 7.
Email reporters a reminder if they don't tweet about their stories.
Show them Tweetdeck.
Make sure their @names are in the email footers.
Make sure they are following the list of all reporters in the newsroom.

The question is: what's the most simple, clear and measurable win for reporters on Twitter? Something that they can look at and think "Oh yes, that worked, helped my story, made me more productive and saved me time..."

Your ideas?

An Environment for Succeeding

2013-05-23T06:53:00.001-04:00

Chris Brogan of Human Business Works is a tireless campaigner for doing the work. You can have great ideas, you can love what you do and you can dream big, but there's no substitute for doing the work.

He's on a campaign about doing the work right now in his podcast, and here's a post he wrote two years ago on discipline. It's been a long campaign and it always will be, because we're human.

And because we're human you've got to find ways to help yourself and your team stick with the discipline. Brogan mentions Ernest Hemingway's trick, also used by Roald Dahl, for not getting stuck. Basically, only stop today when the going is good, so you've got a great place to start tomorrow.

Next you have to build those tricks into work routines. That's the part Brogan calls "setting up the perfect environment to achieve the goals you have." His example is of a man who can't bring himself to practice his guitar each night until one day he takes the instrument out of the closet and puts it in front of the television. Problem solved.

What's the guitar-in-front-of-the-TV that newsroom managers need to build into reporters' routines to get them to dig in to social media each day?

Phatic

2013-05-22T23:35:00.000-04:00

Phatic: Describes communication that performs a social task, doesn't deliver information.

From Merriam-Webster - Definition of PHATIC: of, relating to, or being speech used for social or emotive purposes rather than for communicating information — phat·i·cal·ly adverb. Origin of PHATIC Greek phatos, verbal of phanai to speak. First Known Use: 1922

From Dictionary.com - phat·ic [fat-ik] adjective: denoting speech used to express or create an atmosphere of shared feelings, goodwill, or sociability rather than to impart information: phatic communion.

All of "phatic" is social. But how much of social should be phatic?

4 Cambridge Mass. Citizen Journalism Sites

2013-05-04T11:15:00.003-04:00

Four hyperlocal blogs represented on the first panel at Cambridge Community Television's conference "Filling the News Gap in Cambridge and Beyond: Citizen Journalism."

#SeeHear: Revolutionary Road, WBUR Poll.

2012-06-13T07:33:00.002-04:00

After Libya's War, Acts Of Vengeance - Photos of destruction and war damage in Libya from Steve Inskeeps Revolutionary Road Trip across North Africa.

WBUR Poll: Many In Mass. ‘Very Satisfied’ With Quality Of Health Care - WBUR delivered the whole poll report through Scrbd, adding a slideshow of some of the key charts from the report.

From Twitter @JemStone suggested a couple of great audio pieces about gangs in London, UK. How do London gangs function? and The rise and fall of Brixton's GAS gang. These are great audio pieces. Interesting stories with lots of sound. The first is audio with a description. In the second the BBC has done a nice job of writing through the radio script to create a story, and added four photos.

In the spirit of constructive criticism: as a digital story this is great radio on the Web. It's still great radio, but it could be more in the digital space.

When producers write through a story, the color the radio piece had in its sound is lost, leaving a factual but flat story. Finding big, great pictures, graphics and data also takes time. Like anything else, if it's going to be good, it's going to take a lot of work.

This raises a significant issue for radio organizations. What do you do in the digital space when you have a staff focused on creating great radio and a time budget that has little space for anything else?

The Public Life Choice of Being a Journalist

2012-05-04T06:14:00.000-04:00

In the 2012 media world a person who makes the choice to be a journalist makes a choice to be a public figure. If you're not ready for that, your not ready to be a journalist.

I suspect it's always been this way. Part of wanting to write to be read (which is different from writing in a journal and putting it away at the back of a drawer in the basement) is wanting your name to appear on a page. That is: when you choose to be a journalist you're choosing to ask for people's attention. You're choosing to be a public figure.

This may not have meant much in the past, when it took days to get a letter to the newspaper. But the Internet and social media mean that the public figure a journalist presents is more accessible than it has ever been, and is expected to be more accessible every day.

Some journalists say they want to maintain their privacy. That may not have been difficult in the past, but it's impossible today. Journalists have to be visible to their readers if they want to maintain their credibility and they have to be accessible on social media sites.

To expect anything else would be like running for president without expecting to have to read the State of the Union Address.

If you want to remain private, becoming a journalist is not a good choice for you.

Looking At The New Facebook Timeline

2012-02-29T23:57:00.112-05:00

The new Facebook timeline for pages has made a splash today. The items that will have the most impact on page curators are:

A default landing page is no longer possible. (That's the page often used to encourage visitors who have not yet Liked the page to Like the page, before they move on to the wall.)

But...

You can pin one post to the top of timeline (you'll find the button for that in the dropdown behind the edit pencil in the post). (According to Social Fresh you can only pin an item for seven days.)
You can highlight a post by clicking the star in the post tools. This will make it spread out across the whole two-column width of the timeline.
You have some flexibility to change the date of a post on the timeline to move it around.
The first tab picture is locked on photos. But you can reorder the rest. To do that click the dropdown icon to the right of the three visibile tab images to reveal all your tabs. Then hover over the top right hand corner of one of the tab images to get an editing pencil.

A post cannot be highlighted and then pinned to the top of the timeline. A pinned post will only fill the first column of the timeline, making it the top left post on the page.

And one other slightly unsettling issue which I encountered: your page timeline will ask you to set a start date. After doing that I had a look at my personal timeline to find every post I'd ever done had disappeared. I'm hoping this situation resolves itself. (Please comment if this has also happened to you.) - (UPDATE: My personal timeline posts were gone for about 6 hours - I filed a bug report on Facebook and after disappearing at around 6 a.m. my posts returned at around 3 p.m.)

Also there's been some talk about the ability to change your page url. This is only possible, it says in Facebook's notes, if you have fewer than 100 Likes on the page. (See Facebook Pages: Bugs and Known Issues.)

All Facebook sums up the changes here: 7 Crucial Things About Timeline For Facebook Pages.

Mashable has a similar article: Facebook Brand Timelines: 6 Big Changes Every Marketer Needs to Understand.

As a nice complement to these, SocialFresh has a page with links to ten examples of new timeline pages: 10 Facebook Page Timeline Cover Examples. Who knew Manchester United's Facebook page had over 22 million page Likes?

And just a final observation (made with a smile) that "timeline" is a misnomer, since your posts don't move chronologically down one column of the page and then over to the next, making straight lines. The posts zig-zag down the page, just as they do in your personal timeline - or timezig-zag. Should Facebook have worked harder to find a more accurate name?

Goodbye Radio's Local Monopoly

2012-01-09T21:17:00.003-05:00

NPR posted a video this evening of host Audio Cornish driving a Ford around town listening to audio from the NPR iPhone app. run through the car's dashboard using voice commands.

With a few well chosen words she can select live radio from any NPR station in the country which is in the app. She can also select any archived audio that's available in the app.

When these dashboards become commonplace in our vehicles, the local control of the audio on the radio in your vehicle will be over. Instead of radio stations competing with any other radio station within range of an FM radio signal, companies that produce live and archived audio will be competing with any company that can can stream audio through a mobile device.

This will scare some and fill others with excitement at the opportunities technology offers.

The next question is: how do I make my friends' suggestions in social media influence what's avialable in the dashboard?

Let the best audio win!

An Earthquake for News

2011-08-24T07:16:00.002-04:00

Yesterday's East Coast earthquake was a perfect example of how the order of news has changed for breaking news stories. We've all been aware of this change for years, but yesterday you could actually see it play out over a period of just a few minutes.

Sequence of the order of news in yesterday's tremor:

News happens - in this case, our buildings wobble.
Twitter, social media and email light up - there's a massive instant discussion about what happened.
News organizations try to catch up and explain what people are already talking about.

This is the reality of news today. Items two and three in the order of news have changed places.

The old order of news put reporting ahead of discussion - like this:

News happens.
Reporters cover the story and put it in the newspaper the next day.
People read the paper and discuss the stories in work breaks and at dinner. They make calls and write letters about the stories they read in the newspaper.

Another interesting aspect of yesterday's news coverage was the early appearance of old news.

People felt the tremor, tweeted and then searched, for example "earthquake Massachusetts". Since in the few seconds since the quake no reporter had written anything longer than a tweet, search engines, which were fairly instant in finding new stories, also had some old stories high in the search returns.

What does this all mean for news? It means that the discussion generates the news in big news stories, and it means any journalist who isn't watching the discussion of the beats he's covering will be left behind when news breaks.

Better To End The Hour With Twitter

2011-05-20T07:34:00.001-04:00

Thought for the day - leave mission creep tasks, like e-mail and social, to the end of the hour...

Time management is one of the topics I always cover when I'm encouraging staff to get started on Twitter.

As a rule to get people engaged in social media I suggest they have to check in frequently, but also that they must be disciplined about getting out before too long.

My worry is that staff will get into Twitter, drop into its endless world of intirguing links, and then not reappear back at their daily routine for hours. I warn them "don't go down a rabbit hole!" By which I mean don't get lost in Twitter and suddenly find you've missed all your deadlines for the day.

How many times have you heard people complain that Twitter takes too much time and they're giving up? That's an outcome to be conscientiously avoided.

So I suggest they check Twitter every two hours, and work on it for ten minutes. I suggest they set their stopwatch when they start and be disciplined about getting out after ten minutes.

But a better solution, and one that I'm going to start suggesting is using negative time. That is, using the spare time created by finishing one task early and before starting your next appointment.

For example, I schedule appointments at 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. I finish my 9 a.m. appointment at 9.45 and use the remaining 15 minutes for social media updates and e-mail.

Result: less mission creep, shorter meetings, greater incentive to get stuff finished early, and more social media engagement for the station.

Making Most Popular Even More Popular

2011-05-15T19:19:00.002-04:00

Each week I look at the most popular stories WBUR has produced in the week. This week I wondered if I could use Storify to make them even more popular.

Here's what I did:

a) I went through the top stories of the week for all the shows produced at the station. I collected the top ten.

b) I then went and found the most interesting tweets I could find about those stories. It was a great experience to go through the tweets about the shows. Some I'd seen during the week, some I hadn't. Some were very funny, some were poignant; all were interesting to review.

(This step wasn't as easy as it might have been. Some of the tweets were beyond the reach of the week of tweets in Twitter's search, and by extension Storify's search too. As a quick work around for this I used Google to search for terms and I narrowed the search with site:twitter.com. This got me what I wanted, but there must be a better way to do this. Please comment below if you have a better idea.)

c) I built a Storify page of links to the most popular shows and the tweets about them.

d) To complete the circle I tweeted thanks to the Tweeple whose tweets I'd put in the Storify.

In review I'd say this was a fun experiment to carry out. I could have done a better job of putting the Storify page together. Perhaps stacking the links at the top, or writing a clearer explanation of what the page is about.

I'd be a very grateful for any thoughts you might have on this. How do you think I could have done a better job?

Social Stories That Right Themselves

2011-04-03T18:41:00.003-04:00

We've all heard the complaints from newsrooms and editors that you can't trust Twitter. It's too fast, it publishes factoids that aren't right: it can't be trusted.

But two stories this week appear to show that stories emerging through social media actually follow a similar track to stories making their way though a newsroom.

In the middle of the week the "RIP Jackie Chan" rumor was quickly righted by Jackie Chan's own Facebook page. Even TheeAdamSandler, an Adam Sandler parody account on Twitter, perhaps somewhat ironically pulled out the all the stops to end that nonsense. The hoax died fast enough not to make it into the mainstream news in the U.S., but left security pundits wondering where it came from.

Later in the week NPR's Andy Carvin rebuilt the thread of a story that social media found, misinterpreted and then corrected, all in a very short time. The story concerned the origin of some munitions found in Libya. It began with a photo of a mortar round on a Facebook page. There was a star on the mortar round which, Carvin writes, led to a claim that the mortar round had been made in Israel. But, after some back and forth, it turned out the star indicated the type of round - a flare. Carvin tells the whole story here.

Social media is a source, and it's as likely to be wrong as any other source. But in addition to that, social media behaves like any other organization looking for an answer. In that sense it behaves like a newsroom, positing a hypothesis and then backing it with information until it begins to look something like a fact we can all agree on.

In a newsroom a reporter comes across a piece of information. It's something he heard at a meeting, something he saw in the street or maybe a story sent to him in an e-mail. It has some interesting detail in it. If it looks interesting he investigates. Some stories turn out to be true and have value. Some don't.

The difference between the newroom story and what happens in the world of social media is that the investigation is done in public by anyone who wants to join in. It's a process that's untidy and out of control. But it's like a ship in a storm. It will either sink or bob upright in the end.

Twitter Stats From Twitter

2010-11-19T08:22:00.006-05:00

Mashable reports that Twitter will soon release its stats package to all of us who are so self-obsessed that we not only tweet, we also want to know what happened when we tweeted.

Apparently a few people are already testing the product, so hopefully the rest of us will soon be able to see graphs of our tweets, mentions, our follows and unfollows, and the success of individual tweets over time.

From the screenshot the stats package looks very useful. It has the additional benefit of maintaining a positive attitude. Within "All" of our precious 140 character utterances, tweets are either "Best" or "Good". What a relief that there are no "Bad", "Worst" or "Fail" tweets.

These stats are bound to draw some attention away from the other stats we're looking at. For non-commercial twitterati they also imply a concern with marketing that is different from an older way of communicating.

Obviously if you're using Twitter for business you need to know what the return is for the work done. But if you're "just saying" something to your friends, why would it be important to know how many people are listening?

And there's no measure for "Kind", "Helpful" and "Genuine" tweets, or on the downside "Self-Serving", "Just Plain Mean" or "Shameless Marketing" tweets. Those important values you still have to estimate by yourself.

Some stories about social stats:

Understanding Engagement

2010-11-18T20:36:00.002-05:00

Philly.com has a very detailed process for measuring engagement, outlined in this article from the Nieman Journalism Lab. They study a significant amount of data, run it through a complicated equation and end up with an engagement number. Anyone with the resources to do that, would do it. But who's got the time to do that? In the same article a St. Petersburg Times executive says they couldn't sustain the reporting and tracking required to produce this sort of data.

If St. Pete can't do it, how much less so your average public radio station or small publication?

Smaller organizations can only deal with low cost, manageable amounts of data. That data and the time spent looking at it needs to produce clear results that show what changes will improve the work.

Low cost tools that deliver actionable data. What are the steps that will get you there?

1. Define what you consider to be a successful measure of engagement (or anything else).
2. Focus on an easily measurable, clearly meaningful statistic.
3. Change behavior and see if the needle moves they way you want it to.

Posts on engagement:

Facebook Lists

2010-09-17T07:32:00.010-04:00

Whenever I mention Facebook lists people look at me with that what-is-he-talking-about? frown. Some suggest I mean Twitter lists. I don't. I mean Facebook lists. Facebook lists are a powerful tool, but they are apparently little used.

This is important because the ability to send comments to a limited list is what separates
Facebook from Twitter. It means Twitter is about broadcasting and Facebook is about narrowcasting.

On Twitter everything you tweet goes to everyone following you. Broadcasting.

On Facebook you can send comments to everyone. But you can also segment your friends into lists and send specific messages to specific lists. Narrowcasting.

Once you've made a list you can share a comment, or any item, with only that list. No one else will see it. You can share something with one list, or many lists. Or you can share something with everyone but exclude one list.

Say one of my Facebook lists is for gardeners. I send my latest thoughts on the intricacies vegetable production just to that list, knowing that others won't be interested.

This is a powerful tool that reflects our real lives. We don't go around saying everything to everyone. We say the right things to the right people.

Using lists in Facebook you can have a thought about your job and just send it to your "Business" list. It's aunt Sally's birthday: just send it to the "Family" list.

(Parents take note: if you think you're monitoring your kids' activity in Facebook by having a Facebook account, you're wrong. Your kids are smart enough to make a list that doesn't have your name on it to use when they're writing something they think you might not approve of.)

Lists are useful for reading too. (This is the same function Twitter has in its lists.) When you click your carefully generated "Family" list in your main navigation you see a newsfeed made up of comments just from those family members you put on the list.

So if you don't have a lot of time for Facebook today, you can quickly narrow what you're reading down to just the lists of people you really want to read about.

If you didn't put all your friends into neat lists when you first accepted their friend requests, or if you want to do some list building or list weeding, the quickest way to edit your friends and lists is to go to Accounts > Edit Friends, and then click All Connections on the Edit Friends page.

That gives you all your friends, and you can run through them in a quiet moment and do some list management.

The ability to narrowcast is what makes Facebook different, at least for now. So don't miss out.

More information about Facebook lists:
- Facebook FAQ: What are Friend Lists, and how do I create them?
- Mashable: HOW TO: Create Friend Lists on Facebook

The Publisher Audience

2010-04-25T07:33:00.007-04:00

For years I've been meaning to write this post, but it seemed so obvious that I kept neglecting to write this thought down.

I am the publisher. You are the publisher. Anyone with a screen is the publisher.

That changes everything. It moves institutions that are publishers on paper or on the air one step further away from the audience. It means newspapers and broadcasters have to find ways to market their wares to the new publishers.

Let me say that again with a little more detail.

In the old days newspapers and broadcasters made selections from a wide range of competing news producers (AP, Reuters, staff, freelancers, etc.) and decided which of those sources would be published on any given day. The newspaper editor decided what would go into the paper, where each story would appear on each page, and therefore what the audience would read.

The person who buys paper as a vehicle for news has the decisions about what appears on that paper made for him by the editor.

But when people started buying screens instead of newspapers that changed. The decisions about what appears on the screen are no longer made by the newspaper publisher or the broadcaster.

The person who buys a screen, not matter what size, as a vehicle for news, also decides what news will appear on the screen. The screen owner has become the publisher. The people who used to be called the audience have become the publishers.

Each day each member of the new publisher/audience produces a single, individual, unique publication for one person: themselves. That publication includes some e-mail, some news, some productivity applications, some video, some blogs, some comments, perhaps an e-book, some more e-mail and so on.

The power that newspapers and broadcasters used to have to decide what the audience would read, hear and see, is gone. That means the old idea that newspapers and broadcasters are the gatekeepers, is also gone.

The institution that used to be the publisher or broadcaster has become just another news producer which has to try to get the new publisher/audience's attention, in competition with the same organizations that used to compete for its attention.

The old publishers have moved back a level. The new publisher is the audience.

The implications of the audience being the publisher are huge and a little obvious, but deserve a separate post. Coming soon...

And of course the newspapers, broadcasters and booksellers are trying to get their hegemony back by producing tethered devices and apps. But that too is another story.

In the browser based world we mostly inhabit the publisher audience is still enjoying the fruits of the screen revolution.

Engagement and Convergence

2010-04-03T09:28:00.005-04:00

The tablet should be a device that does everything. I've said this before on these pages. But now I suppose I have to admit, on the day of the launch of the Apple iPad, that tablets are here, and they're also getting there.

"There" is a place where convergence happens and engagement results. And we're not there because convergence presents problems for media and device producers.

Convergence for media producers:

Convergence is something that happens at the device level. So: I can surf the Web on my kids' Playstation. Or I can do anything I like on my iPhone, or my HP Linux Mini. That's convergence.

Media producers don't understand this. They think convergence happens at the level of their sites and apps. If the New York Times adds video to its Web site, is that convergence? No, it isn't.

Convergence means the people who used to call themselves, for example, radio producers, get their audio, video and text to seamlessly join the flow of content that runs across a consumer's device. (Remembering the consumer is the publisher, not the old media company.)

Old media companies have yet to get beyond their own properties. They are still thinking about their Web sites and their apps. They are still too attached to old media models to understand what convergence is. They are in a condition of unenlightened ignorance. (Apologies for this generalization. I know there are enlightened old media staff out there. But ask yourself; isn't that right?)

Old media producers need to jump out of bed this morning, the morning of the launch of the iPad, and shout out into the street "convergence doesn't happen on my Web site, it happens on the device." The sound of enlightenment.

Convergence for device producers:

The trouble is convergence is perhaps harder to achieve on the device and anyone anticipated.

It's harder because of the variety of standards involved and harder because of competition between devices.

So there are now a number of electronic books and pad-like devices, but some don't play audio or video, others are tethered or they're just plain slow.

And now there's the iPad, which hits the streets today but which apparently only runs one app at a time, like its older, smaller cousin, the iPhone. So when I listen to a radio station on the station's app I immobilize the device. That's not convergence. And it's not engagement.

Engagement is the ultimate goal, and the place where convergence happens, the device, is the place where engagement happens. That's because the device is the point of physical engagement.

But media producers, and now device producers both want to restrict or control what the publisher, that is the user, wants to publish on his/her device.

That limits convergence and engagement. We're not "there" yet.

Platforms and Tollbooths

2010-01-04T13:07:00.009-05:00

Everything in the media world seems to be in flux as we move into 2010.

News organizations don't know how or where they should be delivering news. Cable companies face a significant challenge from the Internet. Users are trying to decided where they want their media to appear. On their phone, on a TV, in an e-book?

I want everything on every tool. Why not? My iPhone gives me a lot on a single small screen. Photos, news, video, books, podcasts and even phone calls.

But users can't have that because the companies that own the means of communication don't want them to have that. They want tethered tools. Amazon only wants the Kindle to buy from the Amazon store. Ditto for the iPhone and the Nook.

Daniel Lyons in Newsweek says he only keeps paying his cable bill out of force of habit. That's what's keeping old media organizations in business. But as 2010 gets under way all that ground seems to be beginning to shift dramatically. Well, that's my feeling.

The Times reports there's a tablet from Apple on the horizon. Perhaps due for unveiling on Jan. 26. Google's phone is here and will attempt to break into what has been an iPhone business.

It's a struggle of platforms, channels and tools, and it could be a turbulent and exciting year.

Views of News

2009-10-27T07:07:00.004-04:00

What do people in social networks want? According to this article by Chris Crum the biggest slice of them are looking for news.

So if news organizations are looking for a new audience, Twitter wouldn't be a bad place to start.

Tablets Still Not Here

2009-09-26T10:50:00.018-04:00

I'm still waiting for this hole in the market to fill in. It's the tablet hole. The space for a viewer/reader/player about the size of a novel. It's easy to type on, it runs apps like an iPhone and everybody's going to love it. But it's not here yet.

Apple's iPhone, let's be frank, isn't that wonderful a piece of technology. It's a beautiful piece of sculpture: nice to look at and hold, and it's just the right weight. But now that I've had mine for a year it has such a lag in its response time that it's actually somewhat entertaining. You type, then sit back and after what seems like seconds you watch the keyboard apparently hitting keys of its own accord. Like one of those old pianos that plays itself, the keys moving in that wonderful ghostly way.

One impact the iPhone has had on me (and I'm sure I'm not alone) is that I now find myself touching screens everywhere and expecting them to do something. Of course by and large they don't, which is disappointing. David Pogue had an article in the Times this week about screens that play images and music, but aren't touch sensitive. He points out that one of the screens he reviews looks as if it was originally designed to be touch sensitive. But it isn't. Either the market won't bear the cost, or the technology won't bear the burden.

Manufacturers of tablet sized computers still seem to be stuck with the choice between power and portability. So you have a rash of e-readers that aim to trickle out their power over a long time, and so have slow two-tone screens that can't be asked to do very much.

Add to that the absence of a standardized platform for e-books and you've created an unmanageable mess of choices for users.

Somewhere on the heels of the Kindle and Sony's e-reader, you'll soon have Plastic Logic's business e-reader (see demo): a reader that's aimed at people who like to print out documents before they read them. This may sound a little bizarre as a business proposition, but the reader does have a touch sensitive (if rather slow) screen. This alone puts it ahead of other readers. But how will people with Kindle accounts use it?

These are murky waters, but they are turbulent with activity and they will clear one day. I hope it's one day soon.

Ancient Wisdom

2009-09-18T07:53:00.006-04:00

Sorting through my desk I came across two articles from Fast Company, published in September 2003. They both seemed as relevant today as they did then.

The first was Contempt of Consumer: It's a Real Crime, by Seth Godin. He remembers the days of the Fuller Brush Man who knew how to treat customers with respect. Godin goes on to berate modern marketing tactics that attempt to force products on people who don't want them. "Instead of spamming the globe, market to people who want to hear from you."

The second was Becoming a Soft-Side Accountant, by Marshall Goldsmith. He argues that time measuring the soft-side values in the workplace is well spent. Such as "how often we're rude to people, how often we're polite, how often we ask for input rather than shut people out" and so on. He talks about measuring his own time spent with his children. It's an interesting article because it raises bigger questions about the importance of measuring, and knowing what you are measuring and why. Respecting customers and reading that in the numbers.

Fast Company must have liked these two articles about respect too, as the magazine republished them in 2007. No harm in revisiting ancient wisdom.

Barn Door View

2009-06-19T05:53:00.017-04:00

The question of the moment is how to get people to pay for news. But everyone in the news business is looking at this from the barn door. The horse is out in the field, happily eating the grass, and we're leaning in the large airy doorway looking out and talking about ways to make this thing work.

There are still some people talking about getting the horse back in the barn. But the general conclusion is that the ways that will work leave the horse in the field. And the freemium idea, as described on Techcrunch by Erick Schonfeld, or Doc Searl's Emancipay, is the idea that seems to have caught the most attention.

The idea has been around for centuries, but it suits an environment where mass production and delivery cost are cheap. Think of your own use of a tool like the iPhone. When you first get one you swear you'll only use the free apps. But once you've got into the idea of using them you start buying. The same with software, or cloud applications like Flickr or Wordpress. If you like them, before you know it, you're paying for them.

Going back to the barn analogy for media: Forget all the trouble of making hay and hauling it into the barn for the horse. Grow the grass, let the horse eat it in the field and come into the barn of his own accord.

The barn still has value, because the horse likes to be there. You keep a bucket of oats for him to eat in the barn and focus on keeping the grass growing in the field and it'll be a healthy happy horse that walks into the barn, making it all worthwhile.

Ten barn door articles:

- Saving the Globe from a World of Hurt, by Doc Searls.
- Still at Newspapers I.x, also by Doc Searls.
- Chris Anderson talking about his book "The Future of a Radical Price."
- Freemium model for newspapers and other survival ideas, by Don Dodge.
- Jeff Jarvis, talking for 23 minutes: $10. Jeff writing 70,000 words: $13 by Josh Benton.
- Radio: The End is Near – Unless you heed Bob Garfield, by Mark Ramsey.
- Five tips on charging for content from Alan Murray of WSJ.com, by Zachary Seward.
- Ad Revenue on the Web? No Sure Bet, By Claire Cain Miller.
- 25 ideas: Creating An Open-Source Business Model For Newspapers, by Tom Foremski
- Out of Print, by Eric Alterman