Mark on Media

Sunday, December 5, 2004

STRAIGHT TO THE PHONE

Trying to keep track of the ways information spreads — and the way journalism may go — is getting to be a full-time job.

Paul Gilster in the Raleigh News-Observor:

Try to track a clear direction in digital journalism and you're likely to get a headache. Consider a small test case that recently occurred in the Netherlands. When a much-loved singer named Andre Hazes died there, mobile phone calls in the country rose 10 percent as people spread the news. But what's really intriguing is the 15 minutes after Hazes died, when the use of text messaging via SMS double.

And this...

And then along comes a study conducted by the Ericsson Consumer Lab in Spain, showing that SMS may be blowing past the Internet among young people in that country. Whereas 38 percent of the 15-to-24-year olds surveyed said they connected to the Net on a daily basis, a whopping 68 percent reported sending SMS messages.

For now. SMS, like radio news bulletins, may drive people to more traditional media for details. What happens when my cellphone can zip me a SMS headline, and gives me the option of a one-button click to have the details of the story (in text, photos, video, whatever) downloaded to the phone's hard-drive for instant viewing?

Gilster concludes his piece:

So what we expected would be a digital takeover of publishing is in fact taking many a strange fork in the road. It turns out that people will read in whichever way makes best sense for them; they don't read as a way of adapting new technologies.

Paper-based books and newspapers will survive even as alternative media proliferate, but with an online component that will distribute their content through devices whose popularity we can seldom predict.

Sound conclusion but I'm not sure how much longer we'll be writing about alternatives to "paper-based books and newspapers," and about "online components." I don't think we are particularly far away from those paper-based products becoming the alternative to a while new pyramid of mainstream mediums.

SOURCE: I Want Media

UPDATE: Just after writing this, I came across a post at unmediated with a prediction that cellphones and satellite radio will come together within five years.

Expect to see satellite radio and cell phone services converging within five years, XM Satellite Radio chief executive officer Hugh Panero says, reports News.com

"Clearly, convergence will occur at some point. It will happen even without our effort because people are beginning to build MP3 capability into a lot of consumer electronic devices," he said.

UPDATE II: Today (Dec. 6) Todd Maffin at I Love Radio passes along a rumor that Apple will unveil a new version of the iPod on Jan. 11, capable of receiving and recording satellite radio. Just a rumour and it may not play out — yet.
10:41:40 PM LINK TO THIS POST

AND ANOTHER THING...

A little more on what Glaser hath wrought (see this post and the post immediately below).

1. The reinvention of a relevant and connected media is on. Everything (the technology, the demand, etc.) is there. Most important of what is available is the passion of a number of people to do it, whether it's as big as OhmyNews or the Spokane Stateman-Review, or as small as Coastsider.

2. We don't lack for models for how this new connected, interactive media might work. There are endless possible combinations of "traditional" journalism, the cheap publishing power of the Net, blogs and moblogs, wikis, podcasting and whatever else will come along in the next five minutes.

Given that, why aren't we seeing more? Why aren't the doors of existing media being thrown wide open and the readers asked in? (Forget citizens journalism: let's go to citizen/journalist, with equal weight given to the words on each side of the slash.)

Existing media won't, for a couple of reasons. One is that, with some rare exceptions, it is looking for the single model (to use computerese, the killer app) that will show them how to do it while allow them to maintain (financial) control. The last major age of change in the newspaper industry came in the 1980s, not as the result of the culmination of years of small, evolutionary change, but as the result of Al Neuharth of USA Today deciding there was a new way to newspaper. Mainstream media is waiting for the equivalent.

And even given model, big media is slow to change. Part of it is bottom-line fear. Part of it, too, is not recognizing the possibility of (or need for) change.

In the late 1980s, I was involved with another editor in setting up a day of training for reporters and editors in the smallish chain of community newspapers I worked for. I saw it as an exciting opportunity to dig into what it was we were doing: get all these people together, do some practical training, but also have the discussion about what community newspapers should be. What we were doing we shouldn't be? What were we missing? How to do you cover a community in a meaningful way?

Those discussions never took place. The attitude of the editor I was working with (and the publisher who made the decision on the agenda) was that we already knew how to put out newspapers. What we needed to offer the editorial staff were sessions on how to write effective cutlines and headlines, and how to get more graphics into the newspaper.

Those small attitudes are rife in the newspaper companies I've worked with: a resistance to examining what it was they do, an underlying assumption that this is how you newspaper, an attitude that "we are the professionals" — all the attitudes that stand in the way of big media letting go.

Still. Jay Rosen quotes John Robinson: ""Man, it's an exciting time to be in journalism." Earlier this semester, I told my student that while I am generally someone who goes through live without looking back too hard, I do regret that I am not starting my journalism career right now. All the things I ever wanted to do, I now could.

Change is here and it's coming to big media, too, however slowly it moves. The fact that so much of the demand for change is being driven by the combination of journalists and readers (so much so that I suspect these changes are going to erase the line between the two — citizen/journalist) means it can't be ignored.

We're not at the tipping point for the reinvention of media quite yet. (Some evidence: I was out with a group of intelligent and generally well-informed people last night and had to explain to them what a blog is). But it's close: there's too much demand, there are too many ideas flowing, there are too many bits and pieces being drawn together and put into play.
11:20:13 AM LINK TO THIS POST