Multimedia and more

I had a great conversation over lunch today with Paul Grabowicz, the director of new media at the graduate school of journalism, UC Berkeley. We talked about why media organizations simply cannot demand a premium for their online ads, no matter how many unique viewers come to their sites. Our conclusion, among the vast amount of possible reasons, was that the market is simply too saturated with possible ad venues.

Think about it: In the 80s and earlier, if you wanted to advertise your business, what were your options, really? Well, there were billboards and store signage, but the reality is you probably would have gone with newspapers, magazines or TV.

These days you can advertise just about anywhere. They are selling ads on airplanes, at the gas pump, and pretty soon your cell phone. (more on that later) The truth is the news media was too slow to adopt the Internet, so other companies sailed that ship first.

Really, it should have been a news organization that became the next eBay, craigslist, youTube or FaceBook. Now they are scrambling to catch up. But there is hope, and it’s emerging sooner than people think.

In two weeks a major cell phone manufacture will release a Software Development Kit (SDK) that will teach developers how to write programs for its handheld device. I speak of course about the iPhone. Not that software for cellphones is anything new. But this time the world is paying attention. Very soon the handheld market will explode. Already cellphones are a huge part of the lives of young people, and the capability of these devices to view Web sites is proliferating. For once, the journalism industry can look to the horizon and see the next big thing.

I once heard a talk at a journalism conference where a professor said the main advantage the newspaper has over the Internet was that he can fold it up, take it on the train, or take it to the bathroom. Well, it appears that issue is about to be solved. Will news companies sit idly by and watch this new technology emerge without their participation?

Already, the iPhone has a Web SDK and very few news organization are taking advantage of it. In fact, CBS news is the only news site that has offered an iPhone-specific version. And I can tell you this much: Just about every iPhone user knows about it because they are the only ones doing it. So far there are 5 million iPhone users — not a relatively large number. But the idea is right on. Be an early adopter and people will come to you first.

The NY Times could be building an iPhone news reader. Or maybe a program that would allow you to buy books from their best seller list. Already Apple has given advanced copies of its SDK to a photo company which will automatically print photos you take with your iPhone and send them to you. There are possibilities out there for this one. Is the news industry going to let this one pass by?

http://rji.missouri.edu/projects/rji-adobe-air-competition/stories/10000-idea/index.php
(Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) and partner Adobe Systems are giving $10,000 to come up with new technologies)

This link should say it all.

In a world increasingly dominated by Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and even things as simple as blogs, the methods by which young people communicate, have gone completely digital. In a recent ethnographic survey by Jacobs Media, people under 25 cherish their cell phones as if it were their only lifeline to the outside world. They don’t just love their cell phones, they feel as if they need their cell phones. It’s almost like electricity. When the power goes out, you start to realize just how much you rely on it as you sit there in the dark.

So why do journalism students need to learn programming? Because journalists are relying too much on others to publish to the Web. One only has to ask the question of why a journalism company didn’t become eBay, Yahoo, or even Google. In the 80s, if you wanted to find out about what was going on in the world, you went to the newspaper or TV News. If you wanted to see what people were selling, you looked in the classifieds. If you wanted crosswords, or comics, or read light-hearted columns, you didn’t read blogs, but rather you got those things from news companies. Not true any more.

The news media missed out because they are run by “journalists,” not programmers. And while the journalists were busy telling stories, all of the computer science majors graduated from college and jumped into dot com startups that took control of this online world.

Programming — or scripting — is a lot easier than it sounds. Taken one step at a time, the concepts of JavaScript, HTML, CSS and ActionScript are within reach by the laymen. I personally found high school Algebra 1 was far more advanced than calling functions or writing a for loop.

It’ll be tough though. Journalism has always been more of a liberal arts field. English and History majors become journalists, not engineers. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

I recently attended a conference on the transformation of National Public Radio to a more “webcentric” news operation. We were not allowed to blog the event since it discussed internal matters, so I can’t go into specific details. But let’s just say that the entire experience was educational.

One aspect of this discussion which really caught my attention was the talk about NPRs mobile Web site. I am somewhat of a mobile smartphone fanatic. I’ve owned virtually every generation of smartphone OS since they came into existence.

Windows Pocket PC 2003

Starting with the tiny Audiovox’s SMT 5600 which ran Windows Smartphone software, a gigantic Pocket PC brick phone that ran Windows Mobile 2003, the once ubiquitous Treo 650 running Palm OS software, a T-mobile DASH which also ran Windows Mobile Smartphone 6.0, then finally the Apple iPhone.

So, hopefully without sounding arrogant, let me just say I’m very familiar with the mobile Web browsing experience. I’m also familiar with the benefits and drawbacks of 3rd party mobile software (more on that in a future post), and having perused thousands of forum posts, I also have somewhat of an impression of what mobile users want in mobile web content.

I mention NPR because their mobile site is quite impressive. It’s both WAP and iPhone compatible, it delivers the news, photos AND an innovate method for delivering streaming content: a phone call.

That’s right, the Web gurus over at NPR basically thought it would be incredibly difficult to build several streaming media services to accommodate all of the different mobile platforms out there (which is somewhat true) So their website contains a linkable phone number that can be called. By “linkable” I mean you can click the phone number and on most phones the link will initiate the phone call. On the other end is a recording of the top headlines.

Kudos for the unique method of problem solving. This definitely has 100% compatibility with all mobile phones. However as a daily mobile media consumer, I have yet to use this feature more than once. I just can’t stand to waste my precious minutes listening to news headlines — even though a majority of my conversations are mundane, and in all likelihood, pointless. I feel that a good amount of people will feel the way I do.

You don’t want to place a phone call just to hear the news.

This video from a professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University really put into perspective how the Web has changed writing, text, authorship and whole entire list of issues which coincide with journalism.

Most journalists I encounter ostensibly think this “whole social networking thing” is a little too far fetched to have anything to do with actual journalism. However, when you really dig deeper into the anthropological aspects, you start to realize what’s happening is that the whole paradigm of publishing is being flipped upside down. No longer is it a one way route from journalist to reader. It’s become interactive, dynamic and now semantic.

Journalists can no longer ignore the Web. The problem journalism faces now is how it can carve its niche in this world and apply all of the ethical standards and integrity they it has established over the last 100 years, and help shape this new world.

The folks over at Vuvox (pronounced View-vox) will be coming to UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism on Wedensday, November 7 at 1:00 p.m. for a demonstration of their new product.

So what is Vuvox? Well, it’s a very creative slide show editor. At least that’s the best way I can describe it. It’s smooth, flashy and young. It looks like something for teenagers wanting to pimp out their myspace page, but only until you delve deeper can you truly appreciate the capabilities of the interface. The best parts are that it’s completely Web based (flash) so there is no program to download, and it’s free for the most part.

I caught a demonstration last weekend during the NPPA conference and was pretty impressed. I remain skeptical however about its applications for journalists. I see some potential, but I just can’t visualize a news organization making much of an effort to adopt such a unique flashy interface.

It was first launched in August, and they will coming out with a new collage feature in the coming months which I must say is very impressive. You can connect a series of photos in a montage, and as the viewer scans through them, there are various “hit points” that are clickable and will bring up additional information about those elements.

Again, impressive, but… once a newspaper does one, I just can’t see it becoming a regular occurrence. Jim Lenahan, the founder and CEO, told me that there are some customization abilities with this product, but they are only available to media companies whom Vuvox has licenses with. I inquired what types of terms or pricing that could be hat for newspapers and journalism outlets, and… well in so many words he basically told me that Vuvox wasn’t interested in contracting with the small folks; only large media conglomerates.

Nevertheless, we have to assess each product as it comes along, regardless of its intention. I’m sure no journalist saw YouTube as a legitimate venue for videos when it first came out. And there are no “journalist” accounts under the YouTube registration.

Who knows… Vuvox could be the next big thing. It would be nice to know that journalists adopted it early on instead of the typical running after the train that left the building.

See a video demo from the DEMO.com conference if you can’t make it to the J-School next Wednesday.