Sour Alba

More on the problems of a small newspaper getting its money from the print edtion. Summary: If the top guys don't all want to see the website work, it's not gonna happen. Trying to get a staff that is used to the print edition and doesn't really understand online to use the internet is difficult. – Joey Baker

“It makes you wonder whether Jarvis has actually done any, you know, reporting,” Rosenbaum asks, lamenting his “contempt for the beautiful losers who actually made journalism an honorable profession.”

I’m still shaking my head over the American Press Institute’s announcement of a closed-door, invitation-only emergency meeting of only CEO-level newspaper executives to, in the words of E&P “ponder ways to revive the newspaper business.”
This is the last thing the newspaper industry needs. First, these are the very same proprietors of the newspaper industry’s decline. [...]

Am at an Online News Association event at Reuters, looking at their mobile journalism kit. It’s very exciting, being portable, non-intrusive and cheap(ish), based as it is on the Nokia N95 (5 megapixel camera, 3.5G, wifi). Nokia have been involved in its implementation and it comes with a Bluetooth keyboard and Sony digital mic. It’s been used in places as far afield as Afghanistan.

My verdict: promising area for future journalism – especially if it’s easy to use and cheap – but the examples we saw just did not cut it in quality terms, especially with regard to lighting and shake. To be fair, it’s all still in the experimental phase.

Judge for yourselves at www.reutersmojo.com.

(filed from my Nokia E61)

Update: Here’s a picture of said kit, showing: tripod; Nokia N95; Bluetooth keyboard; Sony digital mic; and solar charger.

Amazon has unveiled its “wireless reading device”, the Kindle (right). At 7.5in by 5.3in it’s designed to combine portability with a large enough screen to allow comfortable reading of a lot of text. Bezos & Co hope that people will read books on this device in the way they don’t on computers, which are not known for their “in the pocket” handiness.

When I’m on the move I read content through my Nokia E61 (left), which has a 320 x 240 pixel screen. It is certainly easier to read text on it than on a standard mobile phone but given the choice I’d still rather read paper. And this is what I think users will find with the Kindle. Yes, it’s more portable than a computer. Yes, it’s more readable than a phone or PDA. But it’s still not as convenient or pleasant to read as a book.

However, Amazon are incentivising their product with some clever pricing. They’re selling Kindle versions of books cheaper than the printed products (Run by Ann Patchett is $6 cheaper). This is where the advantage of the Kindle lies. Without printing and distribution costs, ebooks can costs a lot less. The success of Amazon’s reader will depend on whether the diminished ease-of-reading offer by a screen versus a book is offset by the lower price.

All this gets interesting for journalists because, as well as 80,000+ books, the Amazon Kindle offers access to the following:

• Top U.S. newspapers including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post; top magazines including TIME, Atlantic Monthly, and Forbes—all auto-delivered wirelessly.
• Top international newspapers from France, Germany, and Ireland; Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine, and The Irish Times.
• More than 250 top blogs from the worlds of business, technology, sports, entertainment, and politics, including BoingBoing, Slashdot, TechCrunch, ESPN’s Bill Simmons, The Onion, Michelle Malkin, and The Huffington Post.

It is worth noting that all of these are paid for services – unlike the web versions of these publications.

This aspect of the Kindle is particularly interesting because many in journalism have predicted the coming of a convergence device that combined readability with portability and provide better revenue models than the web. One such expert is new media sage Vin Crosbie (now Adjunct Professor of Visual and Interactive Communications at Syracuse University) who was quoted thus in the Online Journalism Review in 2002:

Vin Crosbie … goes so far as to predict that Web publishing will be subsumed and overwhelmed by a third wave of electronic publishing. (The first wave of proprietary online services, brought to you by Prodigy, Compuserve and America Online in the 1980s and early ’90s, was followed by the Web’s second wave.)

And what will make up this killer third wave? “Pervasive portable media,” says Crosbie, a media consultant in Greenwich, Conn. “The Web will become the lesser online medium for commercial publications beginning in the second half of this decade.”

Next-generation portable devices — which are just now hitting store shelves — will have several built-in advantages over the Web as a publishing medium, he says. Chief among them:

* They’re push media. Third-wave online newspaper editions will be delivered to devices wirelessly and automatically each day (up to several times a day) instead of relying on the user to fetch the news one page at a time. Even the most successful online newspaper, The New York Times on the Web, sees the average user stop by only 3.6 days a month, according to the Times’ latest stats.

* Prospects for advertising are more favorable. On the Web, publishers face a bottomless advertising hole with ads that are noisy, distracting and ignored. On a mobile device, newspaper editions can be formatted in a graphical layout that locks in a limited amount of display ad space, commanding premium rates.

* For the most part, the Web requires us to be tethered to a PC or laptop. Not so online publishing for mobile devices. We’re a mobile society, and we’d like to take our digital news with us.

The coming mobile revolution will require newsrooms to undergo a sea change in strategic thinking.

“Eight years ago, when you talked about online publishing, the mission for online news publishers was to use any combination of software and online technologies to promulgate the newspaper’s mission,” Crosbie says in a phone interview. “Since then, those efforts have calcified so that online publishing now means Web publishing. Newspapers have got to stop the tunnel vision and go back to original concept: Online publishing is the Web plus many other things.”

Of course, things have moved on in the five years since that article was written. RSS feeds have made the point about push vs pull redundant. The rise of mobile phones with half decent screens and the arrival of handheld gaming devices with internet access both mean that accessing the web no longer requires anyone to be tethered to anything.

However, the point about advertising display and layout of content remains valid half a decade on. This is important because the big problem for newspapers is plugging the gap between falling offline revenues and much smaller – though growing – online revenues. Perhaps the Kindle is another faltering step towards a device that will square that particular circle.

That said, the model for newspapers on the Kindle is not the answer. I can get the New York Times free through my Nokia’s web browser. Why would I pay to read it on a slightly bigger screen?

I was checking out the del.icio.us bookmarks of an Edinburgh design agency called Whitespace. There was a link to a most drollsome site which gives vent to designers’ frustrations with clients in general by offering Make My Logo Bigger Cream – complete with a natty video of the miracle product. The site is well done and very amusing but the thing that’s exercising my imagination is this: when Whitespace linked to this were they aware of the following imagery in the video?

Fresh from his campaign to sue his fans (way to go on the marketing front, Your Purpleness), the Artist Formerly Known As The Artist Formerly Known As Prince has decided to have a go at b3ta.com.

The British user-generated-content site (woo, feel the Web 2.0) is a sometimes hilarious source of puerile humour and, in this vein, ran a competition for users to submit amusing images of said light entertainer (and that’s all Prince is by the way, despite what his ego tells him).

Cue much mockery (some of it in less than delicate taste). But then the following message appeared on the b3ta homepage:

Under threat of legal action from Princes legal team of “potential closure of your web site” – We have removed the Prince image challenge and B3ta apologises unreservedly to AEG / NPG and Prince for any offence caused. We also ask our members to avoid photoshoping Prince and posting them on our boards.

Two things strike me about this ridiculous situation:

1) Surely a bunch of cheeky images on a daft website are too petty to be worried about by a big star like Prince (though he is just a light entertainer, remember).

2) Is there a not an issue of freedom of speech here? I understand that TAFKATAFKAP wants to protect his copyright but how exactly is that harmed by images of him being caricatured? It’s not as if b3ta was trying to pass these images off as genuine Prince merchandise. In what way was the Purple One been materially damaged by this?

Knowing b3ta, I understand that there might have been some images that were particularly offensive. But then why not just have these removed rather than getting the whole competition stopped?

Prince is concerned about protecting his image online but actions like these on his behalf simply make him look ridiculous, which I suppose doesn’t matter because he is, after all, only a light entertainer.

According to the Holyrood Magazine website, the Scottish National Party has been given a ticking off by the Scottish Parliament’s Presiding Officer for making announcements to the press before they have been made to MSPs.

“The fundamental point is that we should not be reading in the press what is going to be said in the Chamber, we should read what has been said. I object strongly to detailed pre-announcement of Ministerial Statements which constitutes a discourtesy to this Parliament and, by extension, the people of Scotland.”

While I have sympathy with this I can’t help but think that the brooding Scot in 10 Downing Street might not learn from the party he hates oh so very much.

Gordon Brown’s been having a terrible time of late (as seen by headlines like “Immigration underestimated by 300,000″). Basically, since he chickened out of the General Election his press has been appalling.

Now this suggests one of two things to me:

A) Either, after years of waiting and plotting to become Prime Minister, he isn’t any good at the job.

Or

B) He took rather for granted all the controversial and superficial spinning that that slippery Mr Blair was renowned for. And, having not taken news management seriously, Broon is now learning what happens when a Prime Minister and his team lose their grip on the news cycle.

Strange story from The Times. Chinese TV is reporting that a tourist has filmed a group of monsters in Lake Kanasi in the Xinjiang region. As with all such videos, it’s grainy and shaky but there’s something there. Could be a family of beasties. Could be a hoax.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgaihUBaTIM&rel=1]