The journalism industry is changing at highway speeds. It is obvious that technology changes have reshaped the media landscape but it is not clear what those changes will mean and what direction they are headed. Medill is exploring these changes in several ways, including how programming and human centered design can radically change news creation, consumption and distribute. Using new methods, tools and techniques Medill faculty and students are experimenting with new ways to better reach audiences. Before you miss your exit come see what looms on the horizon.

In place of a newsroom programmed, linear newscast Newscaster is an on-demand, user-driven video newscasts across a range of mobile and tablet devices (like the iPad) using an accessible, cross-device programming standard. The digital newscast would take full advantage of web-native technologies like HTML5 and JavaScript, but will be developed within the intent of being a mobile app, aiming to make news easier to consume while on the go…

…The application will allow users to add content to their own playlist and make news judgment decisions traditionally reserved for professional producers in a control room. Users can have any kind of news (weather, sports, crime, education, etc.), can play their own newscast at any time (rather than waiting for 10 p.m.) or choose from a variety of automatically generated newscasts that fit the time they have at hand (10, 15, 30 minute newscasts)…

Please read the rest of the entry and vote for Newscaster.

…The best part of the demo came when Mr. Lynch held an iPad up to a copy of a recent New York Times. For everyone who has seen Harry Potter and his magic newspaper, the implications are obvious. The above-the-fold photo of Hillary Clinton at a news conference on the front page springs to life in the form of a video image of the news conference she was speaking at. It’s technically impressive because the video appears to play correctly within the frame of the newspaper page even as the iPad moves about.

While the demo implies that tablet owners would have a newspaper to point at — definitely not a certainty — it raises exciting possibilities for all kinds of other media interactions. Like watching Jackson Pollack paint the canvas in front of you. Or re-living movie magic filmed on the street in front of you.

And as Augmented Reality merges with Wearable Computing the future for news delivered when needed and with geographical context seems bright.

While it seems clear that the Times and other news organizations will not be able to survive on digital advertising alone, it is unclear how much revenue will actually be generated by digital subscription policies. The pricing model ($0.99 USD for the first four week and $3.75 per week after) being offered to the Canadians is actually less than the cost of Sunday-only print home delivery.

Courtesy of the New York Times

The Times — and other news organizations like the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and more — have already forced registration on readers, so casual readers who read fewer than the 20 free articles per month the Time‘s will allow may have already stopped using the site. It will be interesting to see who values the digital content enough to pay. Anecdotally, I know lots of younger (20-30 something) news consumers who describe stopping print subscriptions because the digital experience is more convenient. If they actually start paying I’ll know that argument is true. If not… the New York Times, and others, may have to start really worrying.

A report by Nat Worden of the Wall Street Journal confirmed this morning that Time Warner Cable Inc. and ESPN are preparing to offer one of their premier presentations, “Monday Night Football,” online behind a paywall to current TV subscribers. This is big news for any sports fan tired of squinting at streaming dots as they dance around their computer screen–which has been the standard online broadcast or “Gamecast” for football games.

Sure, we’ve had Slingbox–a handy  third-party gadget that sends whatever is playing on your home TV to your computer screen–for a while now. This, though, is something quite different. Time Warner and ESPN are blazing an entirely new trail for cable channels. For instance, will the content across the entire network be available, or just what’s on the docket in the viewer’s area? Will fans of teams across the country soon be able to see their favorite squad on their computer screen rather than pay copious amounts of cash for DIRECTV’s Sunday Ticket?

This is all part of a transition that began in the 1980s from broadcast to video delivery. As we move from receiving broadcast feeds to interacting with video the possibilities for journalism expand exponentially.

The relationship between the possessions we value and the narratives behind them is unmistakable. Current technologies of connection, and enterprises that take advantage of them, surface this idea in new ways — but they also suggest the many different kinds of stories, information and data that objects can, or will, tell us.

Journalistic storytelling progressed from the object third party narrator describing an event (ie. the inverted pyramid), to stories told through data (ie. a searchable database) to self-reported stories (ie. social networking sites) but I had not considered that everyday objects might be able to tell their own stories. I always thought an Eames Lounge Chair or vintage sports car would have intriguing back stories, I just never considered that a Pepsi can might also have something to tell.

Beyond layout: Design thinking

This is not merely an aesthetic consideration — but also one of product value and usefulness. If one considers the sole value of design to be making pieces fit on pages, an ‘assembly line’ solution may seem attractive. However, architecting publications to meet reader needs is something more complicated, nuanced and essential.

We see design as identifying and understanding user needs and business requirements, conceptualizing solutions and crafting products that directly address those needs.

Design thinking is a term often used with — at best — a loose definition. Tim Brown, of IDEO, uses it to mean process-oriented solutions, product design techniques and a means of channeling new and different ideas that are responsive to user needs. Certainly Design Thinking is much more than graphic design and layout.

It’s easy to argue that Gannett’s consolidation effort will hurt the graphic design of the daily newspapers: they may feel more generic, less tied to specific communities and designers will almost certainly be less involved in the content gathering process. But, by Brown’s definition, this may actually be an example of clever Design Thinking on the part of Gannett.

This consolidation could allow Gannett to redirect its resources to other things. Put more reporters on the streets, shift more design focus to the online properties or explore new kinds of visual, digital storytelling.

The proof will be how Gannett uses their savings. Passing along the money as dividends or bonuses would just be cost cutting. Use the savings as an opportunity to reposition value resources… that’s Design Thinking.

The mini-tower is an ingenious little device that boost AT&T’s weak network coverage by translating the cell phone signal and transmitting information over a user’s home network network instead of relying on AT&T’s balky towers. This concept isn’t unique to AT&T (Sprint and Verizon also offer similar services) but astoundingly consumers not only pay for the bandwidth, the cell minutes (which still count against monthly totals) and also $150 for the device.

This new system puts broadband Internet providers, like the cable companies and actually AT&T, in an interesting position. Why should they have to cover the cost of sending AT&T voice signals over their networks? This is not a problem if AT&T is both the consumers cellular and broadband supplier. But since a Federal court struck down the FCC’s right to enforce net neutrality — the principle that broadband suppliers would have to carry all data at the same rate — Comcast or other broadband providers appear to have the right limit bandwidth used by AT&T mini-towers.

Maybe AT&T’s greed in both charging consumers and using their broadband access instead of providing a working cellular network will end up being a good thing… if it forces AT&T to support net neutrality.

1. The closed world of the App Store may be a mistake, but the Internet has enabled cloud-based applications like Gmail, Flickr or Photoshop Online. While you cannot download these applications, you do not need to. That too is a powerful legacy of the Internet.
2. Many iPad and iPhone content producers are confusing Apps with Websites. HTML 5 allows the offline viewing of content. If the only difference between a media company’s Apple-approved App and their Website is off-line viewing they are missing the point. App store items should take advantage of something device specific — like the accelerometer or the microphone. Otherwise just make a Web app.
3. Flash has nothing to do with the legacy of the Internet. Flash technology is every bit the inaccessible Gated Community that the Apple App store is. Worse still, Flash makes Web-content inaccessible and violates most Web standards. If anything Apple, inadvertently, may be saving the Internet.
4. Apple is not marketing the iPad as a replacement for a laptop or netbook. An issue not widely discussed is the fact that the iPad needs to be synced to a computer running iTunes before it can be used. The iPad is meant to be a new kind of device — but most importantly an additional device.
5. As long as Safari still has a prominent place on the iPhone the Internet is alive and well. Will the iPad change the Web? Maybe. But if Websites have been created semantically, a new CSS layer will just present the information differently — everything the Internet is meant to do.

1. Long-form, magazine stories are not easy to read on mobile devices. What is the future of long-form if — as I suggested — journalism’s future is not the Web but new devices? *

   I answered by saying that journalists need to be more sophisticated about serving the right kind of content to the right audience depending on the device the audience is using. On a smartphone audio is always an option. Doing more to reformat the text or break it up would make it more device friendly. And new platforms like e-book readers and tablets may be better options for long-form stories. The key is not to pretend that televisions are radios, that smart phones are magazines or that tablets are laptops. Let each device have the type and format of content most suited to it.

2. Another student asked if I was concerned that proprietary OSes (for the iPhone, Kindle & Palm Pre) and formats (he meant Flash) would limit the potential of content distribution? *

   The proprietary OS issue worries me less — it reminded me of the late 80s when software development was very platform specific. The marketplace forced developers to make the software cross platform and created common user experience regardless of where the software lived. Besides most users are really using an App or a Web browser to get data from the Internet so the content itself is still not locked down.

   But what about Flash and Apples iPhone/iPad? Sadly I wasn’t prepared to quote Jeffrey Zeldman: “Flash won’t die tomorrow, but plug-in technology is on its way out” or John Gruber: “Web site producers tend to be practical. Those that use Flash do so not because they’re Flash proponents, but because Flash is easy and ubiquitous… Flash is no longer ubiquitous. There’s a big difference between “everywhere” and “almost everywhere.”

   The issues with Flash will solve themselves — either mobile devices will find a to run Flash or designers will present their content without it. Technology issues on new platforms are real, but pay walls and and exclusive content deals are a more insidious threat because consumers, just like developers, can decide they can live without journalism if its not accessible.