During a recent keynote address, Steve Jobs spoke about the marriage of technology with the humanities. (image Apple.com)

During a recent keynote address, Apple CEO Steve Jobs displayed a slide depicting the road signs of technology intersecting liberal arts, saying one of the keys to Apple’s success in creating beautiful yet innovative products was the idea that design was just as important as the technology.

When watching this, I couldn’t help but feel how far from this “intersection” we are in the journalism industry. We are an industry of content creators (reporters) and technologists (graphic artists, Web producers). But both sides seem to be miles apart. Reporters are enwrapped with the idea of stories and content. Technologists are into, well, technology.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen lots of impressive journalism online. But more often than not it is an either/or situation. We talk about the powerful stories. We talk about impressive informational graphics. But very few times do these types of projects actually intersect.

I spend lots of time with journalists from across the country through the Knight Digital Media Center training program. One of the more common issues I hear about is the separation of newsrooms between content gatherers and the producers. I hear people tell me, ‘yeah, we’re doing really cool stuff online, but I don’t have anything to do with it. It’s being done by those web guys.’

In my job I work with lots of technologists and I work with lots of content creators. At times if feels like I’m speaking to people from different worlds. They know what the other side is capable of, but rarely do they collaborate. The technologists are obsessed with innovation, design and communication. The content gatherers are obsessed with stories. Both are valid parts of the complete puzzle.

How did Jobs do it? How did he marry the content creators with the technologists?

Let me just say this: HTML5 is going to change everything. The Web will become amazingly beautiful in a few years, all because of this new standard. But, more on that in a future post.

I am a Flash instructor at UC Berkeley’s journalism school, and a few people have asked me about my thoughts over the whole Flash vs. HTML5 debate. For me, it comes down to just one thing – an IDE.

For the non-techies out there, an IDE (or integrated development environment) is a software program that helps people build things, like websites. More importantly, it helps non-programmers create amazing content on the Web using a drag-and-drop interface. This is what Flash currently does.

I teach Flash to journalism students who have no programming experience at all. After six classes, students are capable of creating some very creative stuff that would take months – more likely years – of study to do with a coding language like JavaScript.

A Berkeley student produced this Flash project for the Washington Post.

Flash opens a whole world of interactive multimedia to the common person. Anyone with a little time on their hands can learn to use a software program like Flash and take part in the creation of beautiful content.

So, let’s come back to HTLM5. What many laymen don’t realize is that the best parts of HTML5 are actually done using JavaScript. The “HTML” part of HTML5 is only a really tiny part of all of the new stuff it will be capable of doing. HTML5 includes some new <video> and <audio> tags, but that alone won’t produce the amazing things everyone has been demoing. For that, you will need a real JavaScript coder.

A part of the Web 2.0 expo this week included a sit down discussion with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch, where he hinted that Adobe would build an IDE for creating HTML5 content. I suspect Lynch is referring to DreamWeaver, a software program that in my opinion hasn’t lived up to its potential.

What Adobe, or another company, needs to do is build a superlative timeline-based tool for HTML5. If a company really brought HTML5 capabilities to the masses, it would offer huge potential to a number of industries – especially ours.

I find this area especially interesting because let’s face it, lack of online advertising dollars seems to be one of the chief issues affecting most print news publications.

While no one has a definitive solution to this quandary, there were lots of fascinating perspectives from some of the panels, and I thought I would share two of the better ones here.

1) The modality of online ad experiences

I attended a panel discussion on monetization of the real-time Web (referring to sites that have streams of content like Twitter). The discussion mostly centered around how to display advertisements in a stream of content without disrupting the user’s experience.

Ads tend to pull people out of the experience of consuming content and unless people are accustom to being pulled out of an experience, like TV commercials or movie previews, they usually don’t appreciate it. There was a lot of emphasis on creating “good ad experiences” and gaining the trust of users.

I thought, ‘yeah, that makes sense.’ Create valuable ads experiences so they don’t hamper the overall experience of the site. This is especially difficult to do with display advertising, because ads essentially compete with the attention of the main content. TV doesn’t suffer from this problem as much, because it is a more linear experience, and people are used to it. I made a few graphics to illustrate these concepts:

TV advertising is a linear experience.

Physical newspapers and magazines are quasi-linear because people will generally flip through them, and there is (usually) a starting and ending point. There is a premium on full-page ads because users will often see them. You can’t ignore ignore a full-page ad without getting to the next page.

Attention is more scattered with print publications.

Attention on the Web is all over the place. In an attempt to mimic the full page ad, there are some tricks to getting people to look at an advertisement before they come into the main content of a webpage, but these ads are mostly annoying and create a bad user experiences.

Web ads compete with a user's attention (and often lose.)

But even if one is successful with ad placement, there are so many other factors to creating a good ad experience.

One of the factors the panel spoke about regarded the content that the ad is married to. The moderator of the panel was Brad Stone from the New York Times and at one point he did allude to the news industry. One of the panelists said point blank that news is incredibly difficult to monetize. Its content is unpredictable from day to day. Toyota doesn’t want an ad running next to an article about its cars failing. And let’s face it, content in our industry is usually bad news.

2) All of this is moot, it’s about how you sell the ad

Another session I attended was how to build an ad-supported network around a community, hosted by Chris Tolles of Topix. This was a great session because Chris actually worked in ad sales and he knows a thing or two about what goes on inside an advertiser’s mind.

Without explicitly saying it, Tolles said all of this stuff – the metrics, the click-throughs, placement – is really nothing compared to how you sell the ad to the advertiser. One figure he showed was that 20 percent of Topix’s ad staff sold 80 percent of its ads. It had more to do with who had connections at the big ad agencies and if they could sell them on the idea that companies would get a good return by advertising on their site.

“Get your story straight. Tell them a story of who you are going after, and why… Sell to people you know and repeat…”

Advertisers, he said, don’t  just want lots of volume. A million eyeballs is meaningless if it is not the right million. Advertisers want niche products and verticals with really specific demographics. Rolex only wants to advertise in places where it knows its customer’s will see it. So does Lexus, Ford trucks, Wal-Mart, and Gap. Can you think of an audience for each of these products? Advertisers sure can, and they have data to support it.

Tolles was also against the idea of CPMs, or at least in when you’re a small publication. Sponsorships or selling monthly ad plans are much more valuable, unless you’re Google and have billions of people going through your site.

Some sites go after volume with no focus – and some succeed – but they have to have a very large audience. If you have focus, it is much more valuable in the long run.

I’m not sure why this might come as any surprise to anyone who produces content that could end up on the Web. We have been reformatting media for different mediums for decades. A newspaper story is structured differently than a radio story – than a broadcast story – than a magazine story. Why shouldn’t we format stories specifically for the Internet?

One article by Nielsen that I think tends to often get overlooked is when he coined used the terms lean-forward and lean-back mediums.

The idea behind lean-forward mediums is that people are engaged when they use the Web. They are in scanning mode, actively looking for content – and their attention span is much shorter. People use the Internet with purpose. Articles should be shorter and get to the point sooner, videos should be snippets or separated into clips of only a few minutes long.

Lean-back mediums on the other hand are the times we sit down and veg out watching TV, read a book or flip through a magazine. Our attention span is much longer because these are passive mediums and we are in a consumption mode. This is why most long-form doesn’t work on the Web.

The iPad is a particularly interesting device, because it aims to bring the Web into the living room where it could become a lean-back media device. I think this is why so many magazines are excited about delivering their content to the iPad. With tablets, people might actually spend time consuming media rather than frantically searching.

At the recent Apple presentation for the next iPhone software, Steve Jobs spoke about the future of mobile advertising and introduced a new product called iAd. At one point Jobs said that the average user spends an average of 30 minutes using apps on the iPhone, and they rarely use search tools like Google. It’s not about search, but about consumption of content. This really plays into the idea that mobile devices are in fact lean-back mediums. Apple is really smart in positioning itself as a leader in advertising innovation in the mobile space, because ad dollars tend to gravitate to lean-back mediums.

On the storytelling side, the news industry should start taking these ideas of lean-forward and lean-back mediums into consideration when creating content. Unfortunately, I don’t have answers on how that can be done logistically with the state of the industry and all of the cut backs. But, it’s interesting to think about.

Edit: As Rich Gordon points out, Nielsen didn’t coin these terms, he just wrote about them. Thanks Rich.

What I thought was particularly fascinating about the experience though was how many people were tweeting from the event. Later that night when I came home, I checked the Twitter feed using a hashtag from the show (#cobnob) and was surprised to see how many photos different people had uploaded.

There was one point during the show where Conan walked out into the audience playing I Will Survive. I found half a dozen angles from this one single moment.

I don’t have any revelations or insights, I just thought it was an interesting example of the times we live in.

http://twitpic.com/1howsb

http://twitpic.com/1hp3ah

http://twitpic.com/1how2m

http://tweetphoto.com/19543086

http://twitpic.com/1hp4xq

The best part is when Barry said people should stop selling ads by cost per thousand impressions, or CPM. No one clicks on ads online, and its hurting the industry to sell ads this way. If newspapers or magazines actually sold ads by the number of people who looked at and touched an ad in the physical product, they would get almost no money! Instead, Barry says, sell ads on a monthly basis or by exposure. Makes complete sense.

Although, new consumption technologies (read: mobile devices) may change people’s distaste for online advertising. Finally, some reputable companies are starting to produce beautiful attractive ads that actually enhance websites, rather than annoy users. But I’ll save that for a future blog post.

Here’s a video of Barry’s talk. It is almost an hour long; the part where Barry talks about the CPM idea is at 19 minutes in.

In case you haven’t heard the news, Apple has some new language in its Terms Of Service that state you can only use their tools to build iPhone applications. The timing of this news is conspicuous, because Adobe just released their next version of Flash CS5, which has features whereby you can take a Flash application and turn it into a native iPhone application.

I teach Flash at the Berkeley J-School. Flash and ActionScript are much easier to learn than the programming language Apple uses — Objective-C. That language is for hard-core programmers. But Flash on the other hand is a much easier platform to build on. I had planned to teach a class where students would build an iPhone app from scratch. Now, we’ll have to see what happens with this class.

I know there are some people who think making it easier to produce iPhone apps might open a floodgate of inane apps (as if there aren’t already too many of those). But building a application with Flash would have gone through the same provisions as standard apps, and the same review process by Apple. I feel opening it up to more than just programmers presents a tremendous opportunity for smaller operations that could build applications that cater to niche markets or communities.

Flash project built by David Castello-Lopes for Le Monde in France.

A student of mine, who graduated last year from the Berkeley J-School, sent me an e-mail with the latest Flash project he produced for Le Monde. It’s an interactive graphic showing the unemployment rate trends for areas of France. Now understand, this was a student with no programming experience and whose second-language was English. I’m very proud of David Castello-Lopes.

The project is in French. Here is a guide to understanding some of the basics:
“aux de chômage” = unemployment rate
“rang” = rank
“préfecture” = capital city (of a French “département”)

View the project on the Le Monde Website.

Is a seven inch iPod coming to market?

David Carr of the New York Times wrote an article about how journalism doesn’t need the Web, and – in so many words – he said he thought that free news found on the Web is bad news for print publications.

As prestigious and prolific as David Carr is, I can’t help but feel like he’s another “one of those.” The curmudgeon kind, that steadfastly holds on to print – not so much for practical reasons as much as nostalgic ones.

But his latest blog post really got me thinking. He suggested – in so many words – that the news industry should build its own iTunes. He compares the way the music industry struggled with Napster and free downloads to the way the news industry struggles with free information on the Web and declining subscription rates.

Now David likes this idea entirely for different reasons than I do. He wants a way people will pay subscriptions for news. I’m wholly against that frame of mind. Why pay for news when you can get it free in so many other places? The day a news organizations charges for its content is the day I go elsewhere for that content.

But, I do use iTunes, and I do pay for music. I never thought I would, but at some point I finally succumbed. I think the reason was more for convenience than anything. When I buy a 99 cent song, I don’t feel like I’m buying music, I feel like I’m buying the convenience of being able to listen to it on my own time, and having the ease of Apple’s integrated software to get it on to my iPod. I can get music for free. It’s on the radio, Pandora, or you can stream it live from many Web sites, but it’s a hassle.

This is why I think David Carr is on to something.

According to TechCrunch and several other rumor sites, Apple (or other companies) could be working on a tablet computer. It’s been described in some articles as a 7 or 9 inch iPod. This could enable some type of business model for the news industry.

I still don’t think I would pay money to read the newspaper, but I might pay nominal amounts for convenience.

The reason why I bring up this show, is because they have an incredibly gifted way of telling stories. They have perfected the narrative of a story unlike anything else I’ve seen. Each of their stories enraptures the mind and single-handedly turns my commute to one of experiencing a riveting feature film.

Just take this one story called Life After Death about people dealing with a death they inadvertently caused. Or for something a little less tragic, try The Break-Up. A story about what it’s like to go through the one event that most people have gone through at one time or another. The second story in that show is even more incredible. Listen to either of these, or some of the other more compelling shows on their site, and any person can see the power of storytelling.

I guess what I’ve learned from This American Life is that the narrative is not dead. We’ve just forgotten about it. With the glitz and glamor of multimedia, we often lose sight of the part that matters most; the content. And this is coming from a Flash Instructor who advocates the need for stronger design and user-interface principles in most news packages. Sure, those things are important too, but we need to think more about the narrative arc, and weaving a person through a linear story.

Now, I know what most people think when I say this — ‘we DO think about the story, it’s ALL we think about.’ But I think we become so infatuated with what the story is, we lose sight of how we tell that story.

Okay, maybe that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but to give an example, some of the best qualities of stories involve words like like “texture” that part of the story that allows me to feel through senses other than my eyes. Or how about “surprise;” giving me a sense of suspense or tension and surprising me with something I could never have expected. Or how about “dimension” or “perspective;” there is nothing better than a story that completely turns my naive perceptions and assumptions completely upside down and opens my eyes to a larger world.

These are the qualities that screen writers or novelists take a person through. Why shouldn’t they apply more to journalism? In fact, we have a distinct advantage because our stories are real. And even more so, we’re dealing with a brand new medium. One that is incredibly flexible and capable to do things storytellers  could never do before. Novelists can’t get immediate feedback from their readers, and screenwriters can’t give their viewers choices about how they want to navigate a feature film. Multimedia, I believe, can tell stories unlike anyone has ever experienced. Check out The Oregonian’s Living to the End and tell me that story could have the same effect as only a print piece, a TV piece or even a radio piece. It’s everything that makes it so riveting. Seeing the comments, the photos, the stories… the whole package. And that’s just one example

The possibilities are endless.