Posts Tagged ‘news’
Journalism is filled with ideas. Many of them ‘bold’. Some of them ‘great’. A few might even be ‘good’. But rarely are any ‘innovative’. There is a preconceived idea in many media companies that the future is what you follow, i.e. ‘we will do that when our competitor does that as well’.
Photo by Ian Lamont.
Kristofor Lawson is a young, Melbourne-based freelance journalist who is trying to change the way people think about media.
During 2010, Kristofor has been researching ways to try and re-invent the journalism industry using current technology. He is vocal about the need for media companies to evolve through the use of innovation and is interested in ensuring that journalism has a stable and profitable future. Previously, he has been published as a journalist, worked as a web master, and even been trained as an animator.
You can find out more about Kristofor Lawson by visiting his blog www.kristoforlawson.com, or following him on Twitter.
Many have called it the saviour of journalism. It’s creator, Steve Jobs, has often called it “magical“. Rupert Murdoch just called it a “game-changer“. But even with all these positive reviews, the iPad is not the future of news media.
Don’t get the wrong idea, the world’s media has come a very long way in a short space of time. Just 12 months ago it was hard to see a future for traditional media companies who were struggling to make any substantial money. Many companies folded, others were on the edge of an inevitable collapse, and it appeared like there was no way for the world’s media to recover. Innovation was lacklustre at best. Companies were far too interested in trying to revive their print offerings then to worry about where the market might head in a few years time. Public broadcasters, like the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, were the only news organisations unphased by the global news market. In fact they were eagerly waiting like vultures for the others to fall so that they could easily use their position to dominate the dwindling marketplace.
Come August, 2010, and a lot has changed. Apple’s announcement of the iPad in January this year almost instantly sparked a wave of new innovation in media companies. Wired, Sports Illustrated, and Time Magazine, lead the charge with new interactive digital versions of their print publications. News Corporation made successful iPad versions of many popular mastheads including The Wall Street Journal, The Times, and The Australian. Other popular papers such as The New York Times have seen their free iPad application downloaded over 400,000 times. There has been a lot to celebrate in 2010 for traditional media companies.
Murdoch’s iPad publications have seen so much success that recent reports even indicate that he is planning on producing an iPad and mobile phone specific publication. The publication would focus on providing short, snappy, news content to portable devices for a regular monthly fee. There is no doubt that News Corporation now sees the iPad as a potential saviour for journalism. Murdoch is clearly placing a lot of faith into the iPad to provide much needed revenue. Such a move towards a platform specific publication is a smart, albeit misguided, move.
However not everyone is so optimistic. Leading technology blog, Techcrunch, have said that such a publication will never make any serious money, and that Murdoch is a “crazy old lunatic“. While it is easy to agree with that statement, if these rumours are true, the move to an iPad centric publication is uncharacteristically forward thinking for News Corporation. It is hard to remember the last time they really made the first move into an industry, let alone a move into a market which doesn’t even exist yet. Currently there is no major news organisation which offers news specifically for portable devices even though they should.
While Murdoch is clearly trying to think about the future, the iPad itself is no “game-changer”. The real revolution will need to be a truly mobile phone centric one. The iPad is in reality just a small device in the global mobile device network. Mobile phones need to be the focus of every news companies efforts because globally mobile phone usage far outweighs personal computers. There are over 5 billion mobile phones in global circulation, but there is not even 2 billion computers. That is a massive market which continues to be untaped by media companies.
While many organisations would argue that they already provide ‘mobile’ versions of their news offerings, the big issue is that these don’t provide specialised content optimised for delivery on portable devices. All the current content is merely a rehash of what is offered online. Take The New York Times as an example. Their iPhone application provides much of the same content as their online website. If you read the news on your phone then you have no reason to go to Nytimes.com and read the same content you have already read on your phone. To make it worse, the iPhone version is a rather dull table layout which doesn’t even make use of many of the cool features on the device which could make news incredibly interactive. No serious effort went into making the application interactive, engaging, and different. If news companies want to make serious money from portable devices then they need to start utilising the full capabilities of the device. Sometimes the easiest way of creating an application is not always the best way.
Murdoch’s move into the portable device space is really just one of the first in what will be a truly Mobile News Revolution. Clearly someone at News Corporation can see the value in providing platform specific news content, even if the focus of such a publication is on the wrong device. If other organisations are to make money, and substantial money at that, they also need to differentiate their portable offerings from their online offerings. By differentiating content they re-create a viable market for using your mobile phone, iPad, and your computer. The idea that people might want to read the same story online as they have just read on their phones, or on their iPad’s is a poor one. However, if the content is different and engaging then there is a reason to access news in more than one format.
Soon enough, news organisations around the world will realise the need to provide platform specific, optimised, and globally accessible, news publications. Mobile news is where the journalism industry will need to head, so watch out, a revolution in news production and delivery is about to begin.
Sky News prides itself on being ‘first with breaking news’, with over 500 journalists reporting and broadcasting from all corners of the globe.
Recently Sky took the bold step of embedding social media into every journalist’s desktop, and mandating the use of Tweetdeck across the news floor. The BBC has also made a similar move.
media140 founder Ande Gregson spent an afternoon with Julian March, Executive Producer for SkyNews.com to find out about the organisation’s recent experiences with social media in Britain’s May 6 general election.
Being fairly fond of these topics, Ande couldn’t help but slip in a few questions about Sky’s views on citizen journalism, paywalls and the future of social news.
Duration 8 minutes 26 seconds. More media140 video at www.vimeo/media140
What is more interesting: the world economic downturn, or its immediate effect on your neighbourhood?
We at Media140 do not presume to preempt your news consumption choices, but based on our own – perhaps base – preferences, we are betting on the latter.
After a boom in global Internet news which has lasted the best part of a decade, it seems local perspectives have gained a kind of drawing power of which newspapers can only dream.
Nevertheless, magnificent Media140 blogger Peter Bouvier had never heard of hyper-local news until we asked him to look into the rise and rise of borough- and even block-based micro-sites.
Peter discovered that while they represent geographically small districts, hyper-local sites are taking over large tracts of the online news industry.
Peter works as the social media editor for Britain’s National Health Service, has delusions of grandeur and is currently working on a trilogy of epic children’s poems called the Tales of Tikulo.
We interrupt this broadcast to bring you a newsflash.
The monoliths of global and national news organisations are crumbling! Well, okay, that is admittedly not much of a newsflash, since it has been occurring for quite some time. However, it does beg the question; what is replacing them?
Read More…
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