I was surfing the net this morning and came across this amazing tribute to Pixar. If you don’t know who Pixar are, then you will definitely know their work. They are the animation studio that brought you Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Cars, Up, and The Incredibles… just to name a few. As someone who studied animation we were always looking to Pixar for ideas and guidance. Pixar set the standard for what modern animation is all about. Toy Story was the first full-length 3D animated movie and really captivated what people can do with animation. That is why someone decided to create a tribute to their 25 years of animation. It’s an amazing tribute so such an amazing company.

Check it out.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[Via Mashable]

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Last month I rode along the great ocean road, Geelong to Warrnambool to raise money for charity. I raised $2275 for the Botswana Orphan Project (www.Botswanaorphanproject.com)… It was easily the hardest thing I have ever done in my life but easily the most satisfying. There is nothing like pushing yourself to the limit which makes you realize that you can achieve things you might have thought impossible.

Check out some Pics!

 

Posted via email from Kristofor’s posterous

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A lot has changed for me in the past few months. Since I last posted on the blog I have scored a job as a News Librarian at Network Ten News in Melbourne. It was completely unexpected but also incredibly exciting. It came around the same time I was interviewed by the Herald Sun after attending the Melbourne Writers Festival. To be honest I’m glad I ended up with the job at Ten over working for the Herald Sun. Working in the News Library often means looking through old archive tapes and trying to find the best footage to use for a particular story. It’s interesting work and as someone relatively new to Melbourne it has helped to rapidly give me an idea of who the important people are and what the major issues have been. This time in the News Library will no doubt help me with my journalism into the future.

In October last year I also completed my honours project on using mobile technology to change the media. I believe it was a success and it has changed the way I perceive and approach media organisations. Since spending so much time performing academic research I am far more skeptical about many aspects of journalism. While I have not changed by views on many major topics, including how journalism should change, I did gain a very good instinct for how to annoy academics. My work came back with good grades. I scored 78% from both of my examiners, which was far higher then I expected considering I was trying to push the boundaries. Watch out for an upcoming post on www.Media140.com where you will be able to download a copy.

Anyway, since finishing my project, life has just been busy. Most importantly (besides work that is), I’ve been training hard to complete a 300km bicycle ride along the Great Ocean Road from Geelong to Warrnambool raising money for charity. The charity I have chosen to support is the Botswana Orphan Project. As part of the training, for the past three weeks I have ridden up Mt Macedon, north-west of Melbourne. My final ride, completed on sunday, was a 63km ride, starting in New Gisborne, and then riding up the front face of Macedon and back down through Woodend and Gisborne. All I can say is… it was hard work!! The worst part is that the first day of our ride is double that! We will likely die. But I can’t think of a better way to go then by raising money for such a great cause. Botswana has one of the highest rates of HIV/AIDS in the world and average life expectancy has been plummeting to the point where people are not expected to live past the age of 40. This leaves an increasingly young population which needs help… and I want to help!

You can support me in my ride by donating here: http://www.mycause.com.au/mycause/raise_money/fundraise.php?id=5190

Related posts:

1. Life In The Fast Lane
2. Re-Inventing Journalism: Can It Be Done In One Year?
3. Life In Melbourne – A Series Of Mismatched Photos

My goal for this year has been to secure a journalism job in Melbourne so that I can stay in Victoria for at least another few years. Focusing on trying to secure a job has been rather difficult, what with trying to change journalism and everything. It takes time to re-invent the media. A lot of time. This means I haven’t had time to spend hunting for a job, but that’s all about to change.

I’m going to be spending a solid 2-3 months trying to secure myself a job in the Melbourne market. I know the jobs exist. People have told me that there are plenty floating around. It’s just a case of knowing who has a job going, and getting your name in front of them. So today I’m going to try and get my name in front of some of the people who make the decisions.

I’m going to a few of the sessions at the Melbourne Writers Festival. One of which is specifically on recruiting and the other is talking about leadership in the media. Both these sessions include people that make decisions on jobs… ohh and Tom Cowie who I went up against for the Crikey job is also on the first panel I’ll be attending. It is the perfect opportunity to get my name out there and shout out about my credentials, and maybe get people I know on the panels, like Tom Cowie, to drop my name.

Who knows, with a bit of luck maybe I can get my CV in the hands of the people who might be willing and able to hire me. I just want a journalism job. I want to get a start, even if only a couple of days a week. I want to know that I have a future in the industry, and that all my work towards re-inventing the media has not been wasted. I don’t care if it’s broadcasting, print, or online. I just want in.

I would really love to introduce myself as, “Kristofor Lawson, Journalist for …(insert name of some cool media company)” :) So, Wish me luck.

(PS: for all who are interested in helping me out, you can download my CV here)

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Last week the inevitable happened. NewsLabs, the company behind NewsTilt, shut their doors. That’s right, the service which was meant to bring personal branding to journalists worldwide will no longer be a brand themselves.

The companies founder Paul Biggar made tall promises of NewsTilt being “the future of news, and the saviour of journalists everywhere.” But this statement was never going to be an easy one to fulfil. NewsLabs really had no other choice but to close its doors when Biggar, who held the initial vision, left the company a few weeks ago. After a re-assesment of the service, the company decided to cut their losses and run.

While it is a sad day for journalists who had hopes in the start-up, the fact that they folded is not such a big surprise. I predicted that NewsLabs would struggle to make serious money from the service before they even went live. This is what I had to say:

“…I am concerned that NewsTilt may be placing too much reliance on building these personal brands and not enough reliance on building the networks brand. Sure journalist’s can build their credibility but part of gaining that credibility has traditionally been partly due to the masthead they work under. I’m not sure if they will really be able to make enough money from their advertising to keep the service funded and most importantly to pay the journalists for the work they do.”

So while NewsLabs folding is not a big surprise, what is a big shock for me though is that NewsLabs folded less than 3 months after launch. I had expected that they might be able to last at least 6-12 months, but alas their fate was already written before they even got underway.

There is still no detailed account from the founders as to what went wrong, but in simple terms they figured out NewsTilt was never going to make enough money. All of the dreams and promises made simply could not be fulfilled.

As I said in April, the big problem is that NewsTilt was not structured well enough to build itself as a brand. There was no clear cut model for how they would make enough money to fulfil their promises. Added to that, their website was dull and boring, and they did little to really promote their contributors personal brands.

However, what I believe really caused issues for the service is that they were building their ‘new’ journalism model to be nothing more than a mismatched collection of newspaper columns in a digital format. It was not really anything new or exciting.

What journalists had jumped upon initially was the idea that you could be paid money for writing articles which you felt were important. You didn’t need to worry about the technology or the marketing, NewsTilt would handle that. They just offered you as a journalist an outlet for content which you wanted to write about. To me that sounds incredibly similar to a medium which already existed…. it’s called blogging.

NewsTilt was never going to be a solid idea. Sure, the idea of journalists being the brand is a serious one; that may be how news could develop in a social media world. The problem is that you can’t build any new service and expect it to be successful immediately unless it really revolutionises an industry. Success on the web will never be sustainable unless companies are serious about differentiating their products.

To be successful and to change journalism, you must offer something different. NewsTilt held nothing different, they only took the current industry, current ideas, and current technologies and tilted it slightly more in favour of the journalists.

The question in the end was not whether NewsTilt would be successful, but rather when it would shut the doors.

Related posts:

1. Is The Future Of Journalism Really In Branding?
2. Re-inventing Journalism: Why Innovation Is The Only Way To Save The Media
3. Steve Jobs Tells D8 We Need Editorial Now More Than Ever

Image by theonlyone

No matter what your interest is in the media it’s hard to escape talk about the possible demise of the journalism industry. Once powerful newspaper companies are now struggling to stay afloat in a market that has primarily moved online. But with an ever expanding and socially driven marketplace the only way to survive will be to innovate. This innovation must be driven by the mobile space and deliver news content in a way users want to read it. A new journalism model must be interactive, it must be engaging, it must be social, and it must be different.

While most companies have shifted their reporting efforts towards the online market it has not come without significant restructuring and downsizing in an attempt to maximise profits from a dwindling advertising market.¹ No matter the size of the company, or the significance of their online presence, they have all been affected. The New York Times, for instance, has shed hundreds of staff since 2008² and also restructured the editing of its news service.³ These company wide cuts are despite The New York Times website receiving around 20 million unique visitors every month⁴. The website alone simply can’t sustain all the resources which the print edition has built up. Other major companies like The Los Angeles Times have also shed staff with almost half of their once 1200 strong workforce axed in the past 9 years.⁵ Another casualty is the American television network news giant ABC, which has been planning to cut up to 400 jobs from its 1500 strong staff this year.⁶

The big problem for news companies is that they are still thinking about how money was made during the golden years of print and broadcast. Advertising has always, for most media companies, funded quality news and investigative journalism. News is expensive but these models of journalism and revenue making cannot be directly shifted to the internet without modifying them. They must be modified to make the most of the technology available. Some websites have tried to create the ideal blend by integrating multimedia and social features but these integrations are often only surface repairs, masking an archaic structure. Adding extra content and features has often been merely an afterthought but not the focus of how the websites were designed. Most of these integrated news websites are still funded by advertising with a few exceptions. The Wall Street Journal, successfully use a subscription-based pay-wall system to fund their efforts, and others like the Australian Broadcasting Corporation are funded entirely by Government; but these are the exceptions. For other sites the ads used are still similar to the past just having taken a new form with a combination of banner, video, pop-up, viral, and text. Often these ads can crowd the layout of a website leaving only a small amount of room for journalistic content. This content is often just a replica of a story already published in another medium or has been used entirely from a newswire service. Such poor designs and approaches to online news development may explain why many news websites are seeing rapid declines in the time users spend on their sites.⁷

While these implementations have worked to some extent they are just mere adaptations of a print and broadcast mindset; they worked for a short time but are no longer very effective.⁸ The only way to achieve market growth in a digital ecosystem is to target quality and original content to specific platform devices. If advertising is to play a major role in supporting content then it must be beneficial to the user. With a push towards the mobile space this is exactly why Apple has introduced iAds to its mobile iOS platforms. They say iAds will “combine the emotion of TV advertising with the interactivity of internet advertising, giving advertisers a dynamic and powerful new way to bring motion and emotion to mobile users.”⁹ News companies still have much to learn about consolidating and servicing the needs of their audience.

Image by digitalbob8

Becoming Digital

Journalists themselves have had to learn a new way of working to utilise their news organisations digital offerings. But many have only ever learnt the basics of what is needed to operate in an online environment.

This lack of in-depth online knowledge can be attributed in part to news organisations asking their staff to produce better work, across more platforms, in less time. Journalists working in online departments have to produce video, audio, text, photos, and interact with social media. All of these areas require a specific skill set that must be learnt thoroughly to even attempt to make the most of any combined multimedia production, but often journalists won’t ever receive the training to use the technologies at a professional level.¹⁰ There is simply no free time in which to fully transform their skills and they are expected to do so. This effectively stagnates the ability of the industry to evolve with new technology. Most journalists therefore only learn what they think will be necessary to complete their jobs and they rarely voluntarily to learn more.¹¹ While this may be an over generalisation of the industry as there are clearly some journalists, particularly technology ones, who keep up with the trends, it is a valid one which must be made to understand how the media is evolving. Real innovation in news organisations is only a new concept.

Journalists might be partly to blame for their lack of expertise but the significance of, staff reductions, drops in advertising revenue, and old media mindsets, can’t be ignored. News companies have struggled to keep up with how technology is evolving, but they need to. Journalism must find both a new model of operation and a new way of funding the craft. As Ronald Yaros writes, “the challenge for journalists is to create new structures for online news”.¹² It’s no longer enough to just have an online presence but you need to know how to make the most of that online identity. Journalism must be re-defined. It will not be enough to just give a journalist a video camera, throw a quick video together and link it to an article. Innovation is now really the only key to making the journalism industry survive in the digital era.

The Decline Of News

Image by Ian Hayhurst

It is all too much to blame the declining journalism market solely on the take-up of online media. The media industry was already starting to see signs of weakness well before the Internet ever became popular.¹³ But as Nerone and Barnhurst point out, Jon Katz predicted in 1994 the demise of the newspaper. Katz had written in Wired magazine that such printed news entities would not exist within 10 years.¹⁴ While he was obviously wrong on the timeframe his prediction still holds significant merit given the current economic situation of the journalism industry. It is clear that for many companies their print operations did indeed cease to exist. Respected news entities like The Christian Science Monitor have moved the majority of their operations online leaving only trace elements of their past paper products remaining in a Sunday edition.¹⁵ While others like The Rocky Mountain News, which almost reached 150 years of publication, were forced to close because of increasing market pressure.¹⁶

When you combine the decline of newspaper products with the issue of declining revenue across all income streams, online and offline, then inherently this means there is a significant problem built into the current model of journalism. Most news websites originally evolved out of their print and broadcast editions. This meant the layout and design used tried to replicate the modular “scannable” designs developed in the 1970’s.¹⁷ When this was translated across to news websites, content owners never thought online news would take off. They looked at online news as a type of free marketing for their modular print editions, however because the content was exactly the same it created a culture where people would read news solely online. After all it was the same content, only free. News companies realised their readers were heading online and so tried to keep them by using their websites to embrace breaking news stories. By keeping users up-to-date via the web on the latest stories they effectively made their offline content irrelevant. The entire foundation of online news is floored and news companies have driven themselves out of business with nobody else to blame.

If the basis of the industry is failing then a new foundation must be found. For this reason the only way to effectively make use of current technology is to start from scratch. To stop thinking about how journalism was done in the past, move away from modular designs, and start thinking about how the media can re-invent itself. Re-inventing, re-imagining, and innovating are the only way to forget the past and to come up with a successful model for the future. The idea of innovation is what the web was built on and is where it thrives.

Innovation Culture

Image via Ross Mayfield

Silicon Valley has long been the hub of innovation in digital mediums. Companies with roots in Silicon Valley often begin with simple ideas; ideas that change, that re-invent, and that solve real problems in the world. There is a culture in the Valley that encourages innovation. New ideas can become big sensations almost overnight. A budding entrepreneur will set out to solve a problem and the solution can often become a rapid success. Companies like Apple, Microsoft, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Google, all started as ideas to fix problems or holdes in the digital ecosystem and have all seen rapid growth.

YouTube for instance, which was founded by Chad Hurley and Steve Chan, turned itself in just 11 months into a site worth $1.65 Billion when Google purchased it in October 2006.¹⁸ The founders wanted a way for people to share videos and the community embraced it. It is a story seen time and time again. While not all of these companies actually turn a profit, all of them have one thing in common, people keep coming back for more, and the more people who come back the more potential they have to make money. It’s a model that is 180 degrees in the opposite direction of how media companies operate. Journalism companies have always focused first on making money, and then promise to deliver a good news product later. The Silicon Valley approach is to start with a problem, come up with a great idea to fix that problem, build a great product, find a loyal audience, and then after you have a mass following, find an intuitive way to make money. By the time companies get to a stage of focusing on making money, their audience is great enough that most schemes will deliver massive returns for the company. It is this cultivation process that is vitally important to making significant money from digital technology, and journalism companies need to embrace this culture.

To follow an innovation approach to journalism, first news delivery must focus on the user. What do people want to experience with their news and how do they want to experience it? Then an innovator must also focus on the social aspects. How might people want to share and distribute this story to their friends? Finding an answer to these few simple questions is far more important for an innovator then asking how to make money. It is an iconoclastic way of thinking. That is, a way of destroying the previous beliefs and mindsets. As Dr Gregory Burns writes in Iconoclast: a neuroscientist reveals how to think differently, “to create something new, you also have to tear down conventional ways of thinking.”¹⁹

Journalism by Design

Image by thinkpublic

To event attempt to re-invent journalism the real question must first be asked, how? There are so many different styles of journalism around now on the internet it can be difficult to figure out exactly what works best. However to re-invent an industry it is important to start by looking at a process for innovation.

Large design companies like IDEO have refined innovation down to a series of repeatable steps. This process allows them to innovate across many industries. In IDEO’s case they have an approach which they call “design thinking”.²⁰ The core of this idea is “a means of problem solving that uses design methodologies to tap into a deep reservoir of opportunity.”²¹ In other words, IDEO CEO Tim Brown says that the basis of design thinking is to strike a balance between “feasibility (what is functionally possible within the foreseeable future); viability (what is likely to become part of a sustainable business model); and desirability (what makes sense to people and for people).”²² All of these constraints are designed to help innovation thrive. But it is only by looking at IDEO’s more detailed 5-step approach to innovation that you can start to realise the importance of such a process in design. The steps are to understand, observe, visualize, evaluate and refine, and implement.²³ Using this rather simple methodology within the constraints of design thinking, IDEO are able to look at virtually any industry, with any size problem, and innovate. This method could easily be applied to the journalism industry.

Another way to look at design is by following a hierarchy of needs. Steven Bradley created a hierarchy for design based off Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. Maslow’s work goes through basic needs people must have met before they can achieve fulfillment at any higher level. While Maslow’s hierarchy covered things like psychological, safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualisation, Bradley’s design hierarchy of needs looks at this from a design perspective. At the base of the design hierarchy is the need for functionality, followed by reliability, usability, proficiency, and finally creativity.²⁴ It is this hierarchy that is probably the most valuable design ideology for re-inventing journalism. Bradley purposely puts functionality as the most basic need, as every design needs to have some kind of purpose and actually fulfill that purpose. It is the same with journalism, as each journalism website or mobile application is realised it needs to do one thing, and do it very well, deliver news content and allow people to read what they want where they want to.

While there are a few important design ideals the hard decision becomes which one is most useful to follow for re-imagining journalism. The answer however is a combination of both. To truly be innovative in the journalism field it will be important to follow IDEO’s design approach, but do so in the context of the hierarchy of needs. This would allow for the greatest amount of creativity while still achieving the core goals and ideals desired by journalists. It is this combined process which will form the basis of the re-invention process.

Design In Progress

MediaStorm.com

Some companies have already started to think about inventing the future, and some have already begun changing how journalism is thought about and produced. Many have done so out of desperation but others have launched as innovative products. One such media company is MediaStorm.

MediaStorm has changed the realm of online journalism by thinking carefully about how they engage viewers. MediaStorm focuses on producing documentary style journalism, which combines video, audio, and even animation delivering these through a website that tries to involve the user in the overall experience. The stories are published very infrequently but the company works on making them as timeless as possible. In the end what is produced are stories that will still be as relevant and interesting in 5 years as they are today. MediaStorm operate by what Bruce Grundy calls an “out-of-the-pyramid rationale”.²⁵ Such a rationale is based on the notion that stories need time and love to be told to the reader in the best possible way. In reality this rationale or style might also be known as “The Storytellers Perspective”,²⁶ or long-form/feature journalism, which takes the time to show the story and portray the intricacies of human emotion. What MediaStorm has done well is innovate the practice of journalism to make the most of available technology. As the president of MediaStorm, Brian Storm puts it, “we need to rewrite how we communicate with each other”.²⁷

Apple has also recently changed the game for how journalism might be delivered in the future. The release of the iPad has already sparked a wave of new innovation in the media with many major news organisations looking to capitilise on the new market. While it is only early days for the iPad, early indications are that it will be even more popular then the iPhone which Apple used to re-imagine mobile phones in 2007.²⁸ In the first 60 days of the iPad’s release over 2 million units were sold worldwide.²⁹ Some of the biggest names in journalism have indicated the iPad is changing the way they think about news production. Rupert Murdoch is one example of someone who says that the iPad has provided a new market for journalism. Speaking at the All Thing’s Digital, D8 Conference in California, Mr Murdoch praised the iPad.

In response to sceptics who say technology is killing the news business, I believe technology is ushering in a new golden age for those willing to embrace it… [It's] giving us new ways to showcase our strengths, enhance our coverage and encourage interactivity.³⁰

Much of Mr Murdoch’s praise was due to the initial sales figures experienced by the iPad versions of News Corporation’s many entities, including The Australian, which had sold 4500 copies at the time.

Wired magazine has also seen the value of the iPad, creating an interactive replica of their print edition. Editor-in-Chief of Wired, Chris Anderson, said that the iPad provided the publishing platform that the magazine had desperately needed. The ability for the iPad to integrate many aspects of technology, according to Anderson, means, “Wired magazine will be digital from now on, designed from the start as a compelling interactive experience, in parallel with our print edition. Wired is finally, well, wired.”³¹ But there is a difference between what Wired produced and what other news organisations have done. By focusing specifically on all the features available to iPad users, Wired were able to create an experience unlike any other magazine before it. This meant that during the first day of sales, Wired’s iPad version sold 24,000 copies at $4.99 USD each.³²

Click here to view the embedded video.

Pulse by Alphonso Labs

The iPad’s platform, just like the iPhone, rewards creativity. If users enjoy the experience of an application, they respond by recommending it to other people and gradually the innovative and intuitive applications become the most downloaded. News reading applications have used the iPad platform to change the way people access their news content. Pulse, an application developed by Stanford University graduate students, Ankit Gupta and Akshay Kothari, has already proven that people want to access their news in a better way.³³ It uses publicly available RSS feeds to access news content and then tries to present it in a way that makes news easier and more enjoyable to consume. Users can select which news sources they want to read, but instead of being presented with lists of full-length stories they are presented using headlines and images. Steve Jobs even praised Pulse during his keynote at Apple’s 2010 World Wide Developers Conference for being one of the more exciting apps developed.³⁴

What news organisations have not understood until recently is to start asking questions about how journalism should be defined in 2010. When Apple first developed the iPhone they set out to create something different and it clearly worked. By focusing on simple design principles and not stopping with an average product, the iPhone has rapidly become the most successful mobile platform in history. For journalism to be re-imagined using any platform, and especially for the iPhone or iPad, it needs to be different. There are now over 200,000 apps in Apple’s app store and a large number of them are news apps. It is easy for applications to get lost in all of that, but if a company can focus on their design process and “re-define the rules, not just make something better” then it might stand a chance of succeeding.³⁵

All of the previously mentioned companies have started to re-invent journalism. They have looked at what platforms are available and tried to make well-designed products. Each organisation has examined vital questions such as, what is it that defines a good story? Where do you focus your content? How do you integrate multimedia with text? How much involvement do you give to your audience? What will be the new role of a journalist? However unlike in the past the only way to re-invent is to bring no assumptions to the table. It must be entirely possible for journalism to look and feel nothing like what it has in the past. While all of the companies mentioned have started to innovate, none of them are truly re-defining the market. All have stopped short of creating products that will change journalism forever. There is room still for someone to re-imagine the media and re-design the future. But it all starts with structure.

Re-defining Structure

Image by Chris Halderman

Currently the structure of how a newsroom operates is similar throughout most of the industry regardless of the medium. Always at the head is the Editor or News director. They will likely have a team comprising of deputy editors/news directors, chief of staffs, section editors or program producers, sub editors or associate producers, reporters, photographers, and other associated staff.³⁶ This is the way news organisations have operated for many decades, however in 2010 this newsroom structure may not be the best model. New social technologies such as Google Wave are allowing newsrooms to take on a more dynamic structure without the need for even a physical office location. Such an example is Onward State, a news blog taking on Penn State University’s 112-year-old newspaper, The Daily Collegian. Onward State uses social tools to collaborate with its writers and to float new story ideas.³⁷ Using collaborative online tools can allow greater mobility of journalists who can collectively take on the normal newsroom roles wherever there is an internet connection. It’s a newsroom structure built around involvement rather than individuality.

Social news website, Digg, is another example of how news organisations need to change. Digg is driven entirely by its users who find interesting news and information from around the web and they “Digg” a story if they like it or “Bury” a story if they don’t.³⁸ The idea tries to make use of the wisdom of crowds to find the best and most relevant news. If this social news model was applied to traditional journalism it could change dramatically how a news organisation operates. In such a model the role of an editor ceases to be important, as the editor becomes more of a moderator; they will in the future just weed out the inappropriate stories and allow the good to flourish. Journalists will become, as Charlie Beckett puts it, “the facilitator rather than the gatekeeper”.³⁹ Socially driven news offers some distinct advantages but often there are issues. While the crowd can get it right most of the time they can often allow inaccurate news stories to rise to the top. This is because “when what people want to do depends on what everyone else wants to do, every decision affects every other decision.”⁴⁰ For small numbers of people this can create issues as news can become skewed, which is why Digg make it clear their “system only works when users actively participate on a large scale.” But other new services like NewsTilt believe quite the opposite to Digg.⁴¹ NewsTilt is a service for journalists, which focuses on reporters as individuals. It is this individuality that NewsTilt says is the future of journalism because “you personally are the brand”.⁴²

Collaboration in progressive newsrooms has also moved into the social media realm. Newsrooms have started using social media tools to make the initial step of connecting with users. These social sites provide a streamlined way of crowd sourcing ideas and more importantly of distributing content to people who want to listen. Sites like the Wall Street Journal, one of the few profitable news organisations in the world, are operating up to 100 Twitter feeds in an attempt to connect with very focused audiences relevant to the websites content.⁴³

Finding The Future

Image by Don Solo

Even though many websites have tried to adopt new technologies into their websites, the fact still remains that many major news websites have been based off newspaper designs. As Lynee Cooke points out the modular look of news websites was largely based on “the same visual trajectory” as a 1980’s newspaper.⁴⁴ By basing many of their initial website designs on newspaper’s, media companies inherently created a culture where they believed the newspaper would still hold dominance over digital space. Had these sites been designed differently then online journalism might have progressed down a completely different design path to what it did. News companies were choosing to work in the past at a time when major websites like Google were reaping the rewards of designs that utilised the Internet’s potential. This oversight may just have cost news companies the edge with funding their digital efforts.

While Google’s clean design eventually made way for an advertising model, often the ads are just as relevant to a users search as the search results themselves. In essence Google’s funding model drives itself. This is not the case with news websites whose archaic structure often delivers advertising irrelevant to what someone is reading and can often border on annoying. But a success likes Google all starts with a good and innovative idea. Many sites have only just started catching up with the technology they once despised. But most news companies have only just figured out that news is social just as the Social Web (Web 2.0) is making way for what experts have termed the Semantic Web (Web 3.0).⁴⁵ Very soon, if it hasn’t already happened, news websites will have to realize that without constant innovation they will be behind once again.

What Should Journalism Look Like?

Image by practicalowl

Developing a new method of journalism is not a simple process. Not every idea will be able to change and sustain such a large industry, but that is not the point. The point is to kick-start the process of changing the media industry from the ground up. It won’t be an easy process and could take many years to rollout through the industry.⁴⁶ But by developing a new method of journalism, new models of journalistic practice and of funding journalism will soon follow. Part of this process is experimentation but the other part is passion. Having the passion to develop an idea and run with it is the very culture that needs to be inherent in journalism practice no matter what the industry looks like.

Mobile devices now offer the perfect platform for journalism in 2010 and beyond. As discussed earlier some media companies have already started to see solid indications of growth through the development of applications for the iPad. Many of these organisations had already developed applications for the iPhone but because of the form factor the iPad has been deemed a better medium for publications. While this is the approach many companies are taking it is impossible to ignore the sheer size of the mobile market regardless of the device. There are expected to be more than 5 billion mobile phones in use worldwide by the end of 2010, up from 4.6 billion at the end of 2009.⁴⁷ If journalism was to be invented today it must have a focus on mobile technology for delivering news content. The scale of mobile technology makes it the most important market available, however mobile news will need to differentiate its content from online.

Providing different news content to different platforms helps to keep a market for news on each device. If someone reads their news on a mobile phone there needs to be a reason for them to access news on their computer. The news can’t be the same for each device otherwise the markets cancel each other out. This has been part of the problem with mobile news to date. News companies have only so far provided syndications of their online offerings, effectively devaluing one of their news properties. By reading news online a readers makes the mobile edition pointless and by reading news on their mobile they make the online edition worthless. Journalism in 2010 should provide content specifically targeted for a particular platform. However this content needs to be accessible from all other mediums once accessed or purchased through a particular platform.

Image by stevendepolo

A new model for funding journalism in the mobile space would be to use micro-payments. News organisations would charge, on a per story basis, a small fee of between $0.10 and $0.50 depending on the content. Users could pick and choose the stories they want to read, but because the content is cheap it is easy for a reader to spend up to several dollars reading news. However users choose to spend their money on content they think is worthwhile rather then spending money on content they don’t ever want to access. Audiences are able to make up their mind as to which content, if any, they find worthwhile. Micropayments put the ultimate control of funds back to the user and force news organisations to offer content worth paying for on a regular basis. People will pay for this content if it is “unique and not available elsewhere… is fresh and frequently updated; is authoritative… and is actionable.”⁴⁸ Providing news through mobile devices allows news companies to directly push news content to users wherever they are, but if the news is not accurate and interesting people won’t buy it. Mobile news is about instantaneous delivery of content, specific to a platform, offered at a small but actionable fee. Because of the size of the mobile market there is far greater room to grow then with the online market. Some news would additionally be subsidised by advertising, but it would be ads that provide added value to the content.

All of this mobile news would then plug directly into the social networks readers like to use. This allows them to share their content with their friends but provides an extra avenue for funding based on user recommendations. By plugging into the social networks it becomes possible to utilise the wisdom of crowds to work out the best method of presenting content. However as the semantic web, which focuses on using computers and artificial intelligence to make websites more relevant, news companies will be able to deliver content tailored to what a user likes to read. Doing so gives a user more reason to buy news and soon enough a news company will reach a large volume of users who are all reading content they find interesting. Once this happens, news will become profitable once more.

It is this new, socially mobile, model for journalism that will re-invent journalism, and I will be sharing more about it throughout the year.

Related posts:

1. Steve Jobs Tells D8 We Need Editorial Now More Than Ever
2. Re-Inventing Journalism: Can It Be Done In One Year?
3. Is The Future Of Journalism Really In Branding?

Finally the full Steve Jobs interview from the All Thing’s Digital D8 conference has been posted online. Jobs has a lot of important things to say and it is definitely worth watching, especially before you watch the WWDC 2010 keynote.

Check it out below.

I will post some of the other interviews as they become available.

Related posts:

1. Steve Jobs Tells D8 We Need Editorial Now More Than Ever

Following on from Steve Jobs the next person in the hot-seat at the All Things Digital, D8 Conference, has been Facebook Founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. The big topic on the agenda…. Privacy.

If you haven’t been paying attention lately Facebook has been under fire from its users for its many changes to privacy settings. Every time the site makes a change users come out angry and frustrated that their data has been made public.

The latest change was a shift back in the opposite direction after Facebook had first made it impossible to hide all of your data. The latest rollout allows users to now control the privacy for almost every aspect of their profile.

In the video Zuckerberg explains the importance Facebook places on privacy and why they made the changes they did.

A Look Inside The Hoodie

Following on from that, Zuckerberg even showed off his almost iconic hoodie. The reason he did this was to show off the fact that he has Facebook’s mission statement written inside.

Initially Facebook was started in a dorm room and so Zuckerberg points out that initially it was just a project, they never expected Facebook to be huge. Rightly, Zuckerberg was trying to show that Facebook really does care about making the world more open and connected and didn’t want to harm users.

I actually think it is rather cool that they print their mission inside their hoodie. What do you think, is Facebook really a cult?

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In the past few months everyone has been talking about the iPad and how it might save the journalism industry. Finally Steve Jobs has commented on the situation at All Things Digital‘s D8 conference held this year at the Terranea Resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

Steve spoke clearly with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg about many topics, questions, controversies that have come up surrounding Apple recently and was incredibly open about all of them. The most interesting thing that he had to say however was that he didn’t want to see editorial die and be taken over by a nation of bloggers. I think Steve made it clear that journalism needs to exist as an iteration of its current form and that the iPad may just be the catalyst for helping news organisations innovate and make money.

Check out Steve’s comments on how the iPad was designed and how it could impact on journalism.

If your interested in some of the other things Steve at had to say at D8 then check out more of the videos below.

Thoughts On Flash

Steve talked about the flash issue sparked in part by his Thoughts On Flash. One thing he did say is that it appears users are voting by purchasing an iPad every 3 seconds. This is quite a valid point with over 2 million of them already sold. However one must ask the question of whether this rate of purchase will continue, or if it’s just people getting in on the hype. Only time will tell, but Adobe have already been onto a solution coming up with a digital publishing platform for the iPad.

Google vs Apple

Steve spoke a little about Google and how Apple has seen them move to the position of a competitor. Part of this is to do with the rumours that Microsoft’s Bing might replace Google for iPhone search. But Steve pointed out that Apple still plans to work with Google because they offer a lot of great products.

iAd’s and Application data – Who owns it?

One of the big controversies with Apples planned iAd’s program is just who can use data. Steve said that Apple took the position that advertisers could gain access to data to target ads however app developers couldn’t get access to data for their own purposes or to allow them to monitor their apps with analytics software. Mostly this is sparked because of analytics firm Flurry monitoring application usage and picking up that an iPad existed before it was even launched, and that Apple was working on iPhone OS 4.0. Apple obviously were mad that analytics companies were using this data to peak into what Apple had been working on and so they reacted. To be honest Apple’s position on this issue is ridiculous but the word from Steve seems to be Watch This Space. I expect Apple to come up with their own analytics solution for app developers in the near future.

What really happened with the lost iPhone?

This was one of the biggest stories in tech circles. Gizmodo purchased an iPhone prototype which was lost or stolen by Apple Software Engineer, Gray Powell. The prototype was torn apart and posted online for people to see, but was returned to Apple only after a written confession from Apple that it belonged to them. Even the police got involved and seized computers from the Gizmodo editor. As Steve pointed out it was shaping into a really thrilling story. Steve also made the joke that there might even be some sex in this story somewhere as well. Apple however seems not to be laughing too hard as an app called ‘Lost in a Bar’ which helps people find their lost iPhone prototypes was rejected from the app store.

The problems with the TV market

Google has decided to enter the TV market recently and bring the web to the television, and so Steve Jobs was asked to comment on the television industry and whether Apple could innovate there. Apple of course already have their Apple TV product, but as many blogs have pointed out they have considered this more of a hobby. TechCrunch has said however that Google entering the industry may in fact force Apple to start building their own televisions or to start considering Apple TV as more than a hobby. Steve however thinks that Google will find out soon enough that the TV market is to difficult to enter.

AT&T network speed

In the US iPhone users have been locked into using the AT&T network with their iPhone. The problem however is that there are now so many people using the network that people are having trouble making phone calls on it. Steve says someone at Apple is talking about the issues and they believe things will speed up soon.

Steve talks about the FoxConn suicides

In recent days there has been a string of suicides, attempted suicides, and deaths from being overworked, at FoxConn. For those who don’t know who FoxConn is, they build many of Apple’s products. FoxConn reacted by raising wages by 30%. Steve said that Apple has been all over the incidents and for the moment are confident that the suicides are not a concern as over 400,000 people work at FoxConn. This would mean the suicides were lower than the expected rate for that amount of people.

So what do you think about all that Steve Jobs had to say?? I think he made some very excellent points throughout and still shows the same passion for the company which he had the day he founded it.

Related posts:

1. The FULL Steve Jobs Interview From D8
2. Re-inventing Journalism: Why Innovation Is The Only Way To Save The Media
3. Why Google Is So Important To Journalism

If you have followed the journalism debate for a while you will know that Rupert Murdoch has been out to get Google and other news aggregators. He has said that Google is stealing all his content (which is simply not the case), and so is putting up pay-walls around all his websites.

This week though I’ve been reading a great book written by Ken Auletta called Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, and it has done nothing but solidify my position that Google is vitally important to online news.

Auletta’s book is a history of Google starting from the beginning, however it covers the company from many different perspectives. One of these perspectives looks directly at what Google has done with news content through Google News. The book goes through a lot of the reasoning behind different decisions by Google and some of the deals it has made with the likes of the Associated Press and other media. But the issue for Murdoch is that he thinks Google has been stealing his content. I only have one question for Mr Murdoch…. What content does he have worth stealing???

Since when has a News Corporation company really cared about creating quality content which is worth paying for? With the exception of the Wall Street Journal of course. Murdoch needs to stop complaining about Google and other aggregators which send them large amounts of traffic. They can’t possibly survive digitally without having their content indexed in some form by Google. Google is the pathway to information for most people, no other search engine matches this.

Whatever Mr Murdoch thinks, the fact remains that Google is not out there to destroy companies but is out there to make information accessible. They’re innovators, and it’s hard for innovators to sit still while a market is dying. It is impossible for Google to operate without looking at a market that’s stagnant and saying, ‘we can do better’. But if news organisations were even interested in keeping readers on their sites they would learn to be innovators. If they were innovators maybe they would be receiving the huge amounts of traffic which Google is receiving. Newspapers have a huge amount of data and should have been in search for a long time. Either way they need to start making quality content for all devices.

It is not just enough to distribute your content to multiple platforms but news companies need to learn to create quality content specifically for a platform. Platform specific content is the only way you can create serious profit from all mediums. It’s the only way to create content which does not take away the need to view news on another device. If I look at news on my phone, why would I want to read the same thing on my laptop? There needs to be a reason for me to go to each product offering.

Learn to innovate and add value to all of your offerings. This is the only way to be successful digitally.

Related posts:

1. Steve Jobs Tells D8 We Need Editorial Now More Than Ever
2. Re-inventing Journalism: Why Innovation Is The Only Way To Save The Media