Hard News, Inc.

Future Newspaper: Will it Look Like Harry Potter's "Daily Prophet"?

This is getting really, really close to the vision of the future that all the e-Ink dweebs have been yammering about for, oh, the last 40 years or so. The idea of an object that marries the (perceived) strengths of a newspaper with the electronic display have become something of an obsession for old-guard newspaper editors/publishers/curmudgeons.  More on that in a bit. 

For now, check out this nifty little Kindle-a-like...

I particularly like how the display can now handle much better grayscale, and especially how you can use a stylus (finger?) to control the display, write your own notes, etc.  The form factor of stuff welded to a hunk of plastic is obviously just a "placeholder," so the ugly industrial look right now doesn't bother me. 

We're still missing the part where we can roll the damn thing up and stick it in a backpack or back pocket ... but, given the delicate liquid crystals in the display, that vision of what the display can/will be is most likely a mirage anyway.  Also, I don't think I'd recommend treating any of the rather toxic & corrosive battery technologies with such cavalier violence either.



With all the numbers that have come out this week about how the newspaper (and magazine) print products are convulsing in violent death throes, much faster than even the most pessimistic among us had feared, a vision of what the future of the news product might look like as shown here is somewhat heartening. 

And yeah, I know. Focusing in on a physical object that the news is delivered on is like a restaurant critic obsessing over the china pattern on the plate that the duck a l'orange is served on. 

However.  To extrapolate to the more trenchant issues in the newspaper industry - it's more important to focus in on whether the duck is moldy, or the duck appears a day after you order it, or the other diners start pelting you with the green beans almondine while the waiter steals your wallet and screams in your ear about a real-estate opportunity... [Wow! I think I just waterboarded that metaphor! W00t! Yay me!]

While I love the idea of using one of these things to read the news, to have it in my pocket or carried around with my other junk, constantly updating me as to what's going on ... my fear is that newspapers & media companies will focus in on this as a possible magic solution to their problems.  This isn't because the people in charge are bad, or stupid, or any of the other calumnies flung their way by the increasingly smug digerati (and mea culpa, I have been guilty of that myself on occasion).

It's because newspapers are run by corporations these days, and corporate guys look to concrete, hard solutions to problems that they can wrap their minds around.  Problems with product distribution call for investment in shiny new trucks or routing equipment or big heavy steel cranes ... things that you spend money on, that are built of metal and that have big engines in them that make the floor shake a little bit, and that make you feel like you spent your money on something substantial, something that has value.

In contrast, spending a buncha coin on a squishy, touchy-feely thing like "changing corporate culture," or "re-imagining product possibilities," or empowering entrepreneurial spirit" ... well, a good example of this is the war in Iraq.  Or the war on drugs.

We spend massive sums on technological, physical solutions to what is basically a mental & spiritual problem.  We bomb the shit out of Fallujah, or build big radar dirigibles to patrol the border for cocaine smugglers, and wonder what it is that went wrong when the problem just morphs into some other face, and continues somewhere else, away from the heavy iron Death Machine we've constructed.

Thoughts?



Technorati Tags: Amazon Kindle, e-ink, newspaper death spiral, digital migration, Daily Prophet

Time, Inc. Reorganizes and (sigh) Lays Off 600

Not a good week in journalism.  And this cover story was, unfortunately, quite prophetic for a lot of Time, Inc. staffers.



Of interest, amidst the "can you braid this into a noose for me please?"-type news, is the announcement by CEO Ann Moore that Time Inc. is cutting staff as part of a reorganization plan:

...effective tomorrow, we are going to implement a much more centralized management structure, organized into three business units that will group together titles that share similar audiences, advertisers, and the talents and skills of their staffs. The goal is to enable our company to move faster, go to market smarter, save significant costs, and employ our editorial resources more efficiently.

Well, that part sounds pretty good.  But this next bit kinda leaves me scratching my head.  They're organizing the company into three "Business Units":

* News: the existing print and digital properties in the TIME group, the Fortune|Money group, and the Sports Illustrated group, as well as Life.com and GEE. John Squires, EVP Time Inc. will manage the News Business Unit.
* Style and Entertainment: the existing print and digital properties in the PEOPLE group, InStyle, Entertainment Weekly, and Essence. I will act as the EVP for this group so the Style and Entertainment Business Unit will report to me.
* Lifestyle: the existing print and digital properties of Real Simple, This Old House, All You, Southern Living, Cooking Light, Sunset, Health, Cottage Living, Coastal Living, and Southern Accents, along with MyRecipes.com and MyHomeIdeas.com. Sylvia Auton, EVP Time Inc. will manage the Lifestyle Business Unit, while also retaining responsibility for IPC Media.

Apparently, this is to take advantage of one of the other key areas of the reorg, which is to set loose the Ad Sales staff on selling ads across a range of related properties.  Which, in theory, would make sense -- but I'm not sure that any internal measures are going to change the dynamics hitting national mags.  When the Big Three automakers teeter on the brink of bankruptcy, offering them easier access to your ad pages because you can now sell them space in a dozen mags, rather than just a couple, is not really a game-changer.

Moore goes on to tout recent collaboration across Time Inc. properties, such as when Sports Illustrated shared photos to the TIME.com website, or the magazines sharing content, such as a Time cover piece on the economy that was written by a Fortune staff writer.

Why does this feel like making a virtue out of a necessity?  Of course the SI photogs are shipping their photos to the TIME sites. That's because TIME can't afford to send their own photogs to Beijing to cover the events.  And the fact that TIME has to rely on a writer from another magazine to provide the necessary perspective on THE GIGANTIC STORY OF THE MOMENT is evidence of the fact that TIME is getting so thin on staff that they have to reach out to magazines that still have core competency in economic issues to try to make sense of the global meltdown.  Once upon a TIME, such people already on hand, working in the newsroom on deep, insightful stories.

BTW - I've been noticing that TIME hardly even runs ads anymore.  Again, I remember the good ol' days, when the mag was so crammed with ads that it was hard sometimes to read the stories, because they had to jump across so many pages.  I can't remember the last time I saw a double-truck car, computer or tobacco ad in TIME.

Likewise, missing in all of this is any real description of where the money is going to come from.  Go ahead, click over and read the memo.  I can't figure it out. There's brave talk about how the company is still profitable and making money, doing good work, the website is growing, yada yada ... but other than streamlining some internal business processes, I can't quite make out where there's a description of the new revenue streams or multimedia products that TIME is developing that will grow to offset the circulation and readership declines.

And philosophically, creating more silos in your business is not really a step forward when it comes to the web.  The mere fact of yanking a bunch of content from one arbitrarily created designation and sticking it under a newer, fancier title ... really doesn't mean all that much to the page traffic that's coming in from Google.

Now then - if Time, Inc. had announced that it was going to be creating new topic verticals (retirement investment planning, children's health, mobile electronics) as part of a wide-ranging web initiative ... where the best writers, photographers, artists, etc., from ALL OF TIME'S PROPERTIES, clustered to create content for specific interest niches that would appeal to readers and advertisers alike ... and that they were doing this as part of a long-term transition from a world where the branding on an ink-on-paper cover actually meant something ... rather than a world where what matters is the SEO results that drive audience traffic to your content ... and that Time, Inc, then went on to create these fascinating cross-property conversations between their writers ... you know, something around which you also empower social clustering and affinity groups to comment on, add to, and repurpose your content ...

...then that would have really blown me out of my chair.

Technorati Tags: TIME layoffs, reorganization, digital migration, TIME magazine, deckchairs on TItanic

Stealth Bomber - Made in China (*detail)

Stealth Bomber - Made in China (*detail)
Originally uploaded by Wordyeti

I knew even before I flipped this cheap little plastic toy over what I'd find on the bottom. "Made in China." It was so predictable that the only surprise was how easy it was to confirm the cliche.

I'm not sure that I'm up for some crypto-nativist screed on how we should have factories churning out stacks of shoddy extruded-plastic junk... but I really do hope the Air Force guys have something else up their sleeves for air & technological superiority. 'Cause this design is pretty much public domain right now, y'all.

When I first moved to California, my first big assignment took me out to 29 Palms. It was something straight outta Raymond Chandler - an assignment that turned out to be a set-up, one that me and the photographer barely escaped from.

But that is a long and dark story for another time.

The relevance to this is that as I drove through the night with the top down on the first convertible I'd ever driven, still shaking with adrenaline, I looked up and saw all kinds of crazy lights in the sky chasing each other around. I thought I was hallucinating from the stress and shock, but overhead, it looked like there were UFOs straight outta Spielberg's Close Encounters wheeling, stopping, starting, going straight up and spinning around.

I pulled over to the side of the road, alarmed, and wondering if someone had slipped something into my drink when we were waiting for the "source" to show up, or if I'd been poisoned or hurt somehow when we made the mad sprint to our cars when the ugly truth dawned.

But overhead, the lights just kept on moving around, and nobody else seemed to be paying any attention. Off in the distance, the giant wind generators flailed.

It was, of course, the Stealth Fighters, Bombers and other experimental aircraft buzzing around in the dark, secure from the eyes of spies or Office of the Inspector General auditors.

War Face

War Face
Originally uploaded by Wordyeti

"Lemme see your war face!"

"Aaaarrrrrgh!"

"That's not a war face. THIS is a war face."

"AAAAAAAAAARRRRGRRRRRRRGHHH!!!!!!!!!"

"You don't scare me. Work on it."

(Taken at the Tucson Air Museum, after wandering around in the hot sun for a couple of hours. My brains were baking. That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.)

...the FailWhale Spouts for Thee...

It's still kind of a guessing game as to the motivations behind it, but Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey is out, and Evan Williams, the co-founder of the addictive microblogging service, has moved back to CEO from chairman.

Suspects in the shakeup include:

1. The generally shitty economy, where companies are making moves the same way investors are with the stock market - because they're scared and figure they had best "do something";
2. FriendFeed has been slowly peeling away Twitter users;
3. The persistent appearance of the FailWhale;
4. The persistent NON-appearance of a business model.

On the Twitter blog, Williams says:

We're entering a new phase now and there are new kinds of challenges ahead. Healthy companies acknowledge the need for change even during the best of times. As Twitter grows both internally and externally, we took a good look at our path forward and saw the need for a focused approach from a single leader.

Single leader, eh? Focused approach. Even during the best of times (which means that these have clearly not been those). Hmm.

...and then, as if from afar, we hear the echoes of shouting matches in the executive suites and the sounds of many Oreos being hurled at high velocities, shattering on the smeared whiteboards...

I like Twitter. I'm using it more & more to keep track of all the cool stuff my friends & contacts are dabbling in on the web.  Hope they can figure out a way to extract the $$ from the traffic stream.

Technorati Tags: twitter ceo, business model, failwhale spouts, failing economy

Barry Diller on Internet Advertising: "It makes my head hurt."

I know how you feel, Barry.

This quote from an excellent Wall St. Journal interview with one of the smarter (and more ruthless) guys in the media biz. He's coming forward to explain why he busted up IAC.

“You really want to get a headache? Try to understand Internet advertising. Social-networking advertising is being discounted because there is so much inventory [of available ad spots], and because methods have not yet been found to make it very effective. Will that get figured out? I absolutely believe it will. What form will it take? Absolutely unknown.”

Technorati Tags: Barry Diller, internet advertising, social networking, monetizing content

Mobile Banking? Sure Thing - Right After I Get Rid of This Nigerian Prince on Line 2...

Another quick hit, as I prepare content for the soon-to-be launched blog on Artesian Media.  This one has to do with a "killer app" that already is a big hit in the rest of the world, but that has yet to take off here in the U.S.

Last week, one of the more interesting announced capabilities of Android/Gphone was the ability to form Secure Socket Layer (SSL) data connections.  They billed it as a way that the Home Office can send secure data to its salesforce, or that users can securely share data with each other's handsets, but ... the first thing I thought of was that it would allow us all to access our bank accounts/credit cards/401(k)s from on our cellphones. Personally, I think it's a useful app, but one that gives me the creeps, because for some reason I worry more about typing in the password to my bank account on my cellphone than I do on a desktop computer connected via broadband.

Why would that be, I wonder...? Hmmm... I'll think of it in a moment.

Well, Cnet is kinda dousing this idea with a bucket of cold Reality Water.

But despite the fact that there are many options and opportunities for cell phone subscribers to access their banking information and pay their bills on their mobile phones, the uptake for these applications and services has been pretty weak. According to Forrester Research, only about 3 percent of mobile subscribers in North America check financial accounts on their mobile phone at least once a month. This rate of adoption is lower than that of services like music downloading, which 5 percent of mobile users say they do at least once monthly.

"Mobile banking and bill payment has been available for a while now," said Charles Golvin, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. "But it has yet to set the world on fire."

In Third World countries, where a trip to the bank is kinda like tying pork chops to your torso and swimming through a crocodile pit, the prospect of being able to handle banking & money transactions without having to brave the cordons of thieves, muggers, kidnappers & encyclopedia salesmen that ring banks, looking for people with fat wallets, is a good one.  I have to say, back when I was the managing editor of the Caracas Daily Journal, the locals in the print shop used to warn me not to carry my paycheck openly to the bank to cash it, because "ladrones y asesinos" were lurking in the streets, looking for the telltale business envelopes in people's hands.  Especially big, dumb gringoes like me ... although, I have to say, if anyone were looking for a likely mark to shake down, I don't think an envelope in my hand or not would really make that much of a difference.

Anyway - we have long used the difference in online banking in Brazil, as contrasted with the U.S., as a teaching tool in our New Media training sessions.  The point of the exercise is not to dwell on how much banks in other countries are f'd up, as compared to the U.S., but to think about how a digital, online solution to a problem can be specific to a single market, or market condition. Viz:

Besides the convenience factor, another reason mobile banking hasn't take off is that there are few compelling reasons to access bank or bill-paying information on a mobile phone when most people in the U.S. have easy access to a computer. With overdraft protection, automatic bill paying, and convenient and easy access to ATM cash machines, most people don't need up-to-the minute check balance information, nor do they need to be able to pay bills while walking around town.

Technorati Tags: mobile banking, Google Android, SSL connections

Hoax? Sarah Palin's E-mail Hacked?

I'd like to dismiss this as a hoax, but there don't seem to be any of the telltale signs of a hoax, such as sarcastic recipes for "mooseburgers & cheese" or reminders to force-feed wayward daughters Depo-Provera.

Anonymous is the hacker group allegedly involved - they surfaced a coupla few months ago, issuing some quasi-juvenile, supposed-to-be ominous threat against Scientology. Apparently, they've taken time off from harshing the Operational Thetan Level III's volcano buzz to turn their attentions to the Republican VP nominee/snowbilly queen, Sarah Palin.


Here's what Gawker had to say:

Did the internet just cause Sarah Palin
to destroy evidence? The potential Veep is in a bit of trouble for
conducting state business using her personal, unarchived email address
([email protected]) instead of her official account (which is, of course, subject to laws requiring the retention of government records). Emails from that Yahoo account are already being sought in connection with the Troopergate investigation. Now comes word that Anonymous, the fun-loving Internet trouble-makers based loosely around the message board 4Chan,
gained access to another Palin email account: [email protected] It
looks legit! The offending posts, screenshots, heretofore unseen family
photos, and emails have all been deleted from Imageshack and 4Chan. But
we have them. You want to read Sarah Palin's email?

Wall St. Bailouts: "We are all communists now."

Wow. This is some pretty strong stuff from Jim Cramer, the "Mad Money" guy, who is looking more & more like one of the few guys who saw early on which way this was all going. I have to go back to Sept. '07, when I looked in the faces of some international bankers and saw stark terror.

Anyway, he bites off Nixon's quote to say that in the wake of the $2.5 trillion bailouts we've had to do for the reckless, irresponsible bankers, we are all communists now. Which in a twisted sense, is absolutely true. Only the twist is a particularly cruel one. In the past, the State taxed the workers, and the proceeds of that taxation were given back to the workers in the form of grand socialist projects - dams, highways, canals, high-density housing blocs, tractor factories, guaranteed pensions.

These days, the proceeds of the taxes on the workers are being given to the elite. To the bankers who ran their businesses into the ground, with investment strategies that were looser and more deranged than wandering drunkenly into Benny Binion's and putting your net worth down on the Hard Eight.

I'd like to think that the American public will have the memory, the intelligence and the resolve to hold some of these thieves accountable for their actions, but based on the last decade's worth of foolishness, that seems to be a wan hope indeed.

The one bright spot is that Cramer identifies the same general date that the other bankers I've talked to - June 30, 2009 - as the date when the financial implosion will hit bottom. That does not mean, however, that that is when things will start to turn around. It just means it will stop getting galacticålly worse.

Between now and then, however, there are going to be a lot of people losing their homes, jobs, families, livelihoods and minds. Watch the video (hope it actually manages to embed), and stick around past the first shouty bit for the reasoned discussion that follows. It's instructive to see the sick look on the panel's faces when he lays out just how bad things have gotten, and what the ultimate price the American workers are going to have to pay for the de-regulation idiocy of the last 8 - hell, 30 - years.

Technorati Tags: mortgage implosion, cramer all communists, mad money, msnbc, aig bailout, june 30, 2009

Google Android Store: the Mobile Goldrush is Coming...

It's going to be interesting to see if the upcoming mobile phone platform/application war & shakeout will be a repeat of the Apple vs. IBM, or Mac OS vs. Windows wars of the early 80s and early 90s ... ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny and all that, you know...

Apple has done a tremendous job breaking ground in this area, popularizing the technology with great hardware that works ... well mostly works ... they have put tons of effort into conceptualizing and designing the interface, and creating the paradigm that people actually want to use.
...and now that they've done the heavy lifting, along comes the more open-source competitor, flinging open the doors of innovation and competition to take the tidy Apple walled garden and turn it into, well, pretty much what the landscape of PC-based applications has looked like for the past 28 years or so.  A loud, rude, complicated, chaotic landscape where everything is much cheaper, does kewl new things that businesses/people need to have in their lives, and that you have to be half-systems engineer yourself to keep all your various hardware & software all playing nicely together.

To stretch the "walled garden" metaphor a little, the IBM-PC space, rather than a tidy garden, more resembles a giant sandbox full of toddlers on meth. Only they're NFL lineman-size. With power tools.
 
If the past is to be our guide, the Android and Blueprint somewhat open-source projects are going to start off behind Apple, biting off what Apple does.  And the developers will be relentless.  And the hardware manufacturers will churn out warehouses full of cheap, buggy handsets to run all this on.

And they will gradually erode Apple's lead in the smartphone/app space.

Anyway, here's some interesting quotes from MSNBC:

While Android is an operating system, it is also an open-source system similar to Linux, upon which it is based. That’s creating a lot of excitement and interest in the kind of programs that will be available for users, including one that can track family members’ whereabouts in an emergency to another that offers a short cooking video, followed by information on nearby grocery stores that carry the ingredients needed for the recipe.

Since its inception, Android has been tweaked and built upon freely by developers, device designers and wireless carriers who have had complete access to Android’s Software Developer Kit. Basically, Android is whatever users and developers want it to be.

That’s in contrast to Apple’s approach with the iPhone. Nine months ago, Apple created a Software Developer Kit offering application makers the same interface and tools Apple uses to develop iPhone software.

But Apple has closely regulated and monitored every program that is being offered through the company’s online App Store.

Android will “create a new, attractive environment to foster innovation and make it easier to bring new ideas to market, ultimately ensuring consumers a richer, more personalized mobile experience,”