Wednesday, December 15, 2004
ANOTHER CHALLENGE FOR NEWSPAPERSDouglas Fisher gets caught up on his reading and I'm thankful. He points to an Online Journalism Review article, Newspaper Newsrooms: The Rain Forests of Journalism, and adds his own ideas about the failure of newspapers to adapt.
Pryor's thesis is that while newspapers have the expertise in covering news, publishers are too timid to make the necessary investments in the cyber world. On the other hand, the new Net newsrooms do not have the expertise or skill to cover the warp and weave of daily community and public affairs journalism (although they may do well in niche areas). ... Of course, the "public" has shown time and time again that it's unlikely to get "caught" -- it will just eschew both and mosey on to its own way of finding out about things; thus the growth of blogs, interconnected networks, etc. This "neural network" phenomenon has yet to full blossom, but watch out when it does. Fisher is right. Newspapers have to stop looking at online as something separate from their "core business" and bringing the two together. Good journalism is good journalism no matter what the method of delivery. There's strength in print and in all that "multimedia." Good newspapers bring them together (check out what the NY Times does; like its coverage or not, the work being done by Nicholas Kristof, Andrew Revkin and others is outstanding).
The point is, newspapers are running out of time. Not only won't they will be able to protect their 20-30 per cent annual return on investment, they won't be able to protect their continued existence unless they're willing to start taking some risks. |
A LITTLE LIST LETDOWNI was a little excited to see a Cyberjournalist.net post on the top 10 news stories of the year, based on Lycos search requests:
Top News Stories of 2004:
1) The War in Iraq;
2) Super Bowl XXXVIII;
3) 2004 Olympics;
4) Mars Rover;
5) U.S. Election 2004;
6) Tour de France;
7) Federal Do Not Call List;
8) Stem Cell Research;
9) Hurricane Ivan;
10) Mount Saint Helen's That's a pretty good list of big, important stories. It seems that people are using search for more than items of gossip and celebrity.
Seems, of course, is the operative word: when you click through to the Lycos list, a different focus emerges. Iraq might by the top news story, but the top five search terms were Janet Jackson, Paris Hilton, Clay Aiken, Britney Spears and (the only non-celebrity in the top 10) Nick Berg. |
AMEN, BROTHERPhotojournalist Philippe Roy posts a comment (item below: Go Read, Tuesday edition), part of which reads:
I was a teacher once, much like you, but now it's time to be a student... Life is a university with no graduate degrees, you just keep on going. :) Too cool. The older I get, the dumber I get. The more I discover, the more I need to learn. Sometimes it makes my head hurt, but it's all cool. Note: On Sunday, Philippe will be adding photos to his great blog from his day in Shanghai with Joachim Ladefoged.
Correction: Reading Philippe's blog today, I see it's not a matter of posting more of the photos he's already taken: he's going to spend more time with Ladefoged Saturday. |
SUSAN ORLEAN ON AIR
Monday's interview with journalist Susan Orlean is up at the archives for the WFMU radio show Speakeasy. I haven't listened to the whole thing yet but, hey, this is Susan Orlean. She's promoting her latest book, My Kind of Place — Travel Stories From a Woman Who's Been Everywhere and there's about 48 minutes of streaming audio, available in QuickTime or Real Audio format. |
REALLY DEAD DEAD TREESNewsprint gone by the end of the decade? That's an over-reading of Vin Crosbie's musings on "digital paper" and RSS, but his model is plausible: the newspaper you are used to, automatically delivered to a portable, flexible, hand-held, full-colour display. Overlaid on the current combination of text, image and ads, is full interactivity (links, multimedia, etc.) Goodbye newsprint. The two keys are the electronic "paper" and RSS.
If that sounds far-fetched, please understand that the first generation of electronic paper displays from Philips can display B&W text or flickering video and can be rolled into a cylinder less than one inch (2.54 cm) in diameter, and that Philips will start pilot plant production of one million such displays next year. Technical improvements on these display have been swift, so I believe that further improvements will lead to color, high resolution versions during the remaining half of the decade. Add a wireless chip to the onboard CPU and battery, writes Crosbie, and you have the potential to suck down content from the ether. RSS, which already delivers text and images and is starting to deliver audio and video, makes sense as a delivery model.
If RSS can be adapted to encapsulate radio or video programming into Apple iPods (as is now beginning to be done), then future versions of it should be capable of encapsulating entire, hybrid 'converged' editions. Automatic and routine daily delivery would eliminate one of the fundamental flaws about publishing news via the Web: A web site doesn't actually delivery anything; its contents instead away retrieval, which consumers have proven to do infrequently... Like the automatic and routine daily delivery of a printed newspaper onto your doorstep or into your office, the newspaper (or broadcast) that you request would be automatically and routinely delivered daily into your e-paper device. One of the benefits, says Crosbie, is that the product delivered wouldn't be the typical web site (often a pale imitation of the "real" newspaper), but the newspaper as it really looks, with the added benefit of interactivity. Another benefit: unlike web sites which are mostly freely available, publishers could continue to charge subscription fees, while gladly giving up the constant ups and downs in the price of newsprint and the constraints that puts on doing business. If this comes to pass (or if this vision is supplanted by some new technology that comes along), it doesn't necessarily change journalism, just the delivery method. It does, though, offer the possibility for newspapers (can we still call them that when they are no longer printed on paper?) to maintain a central role in the rapidly changing mediascape. The one comment on Crosbie's article is from someone likes the idea but wants the reader, not the publisher, to drive presentation and content. That's one of the forces behind the remaking of media in the internet age (all me, all the time), but I don't see the idea of the media "package" going away. Not everyone wants to be their own editor. Crosbie's piece reminded of a Vodafone feature I pointed to earlier this year: a look at the near future and how new technology could change the everyday. Among the "imaginative" items featured was a flexible piece of e-paper, with content delivered at the push of a button.
SOURCE: STEVE RUBEL'S MICRO PERSUASION |
Last update: 12/26/04; 7:04:01 AM .
