Providing the information you didn’t know you wanted — Google CEO Eric Schmidt on newspapers, monetisation and the semantic web August 18, 2010
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentSnippets from a Wall Street Journal interview with Schmidt:
Says Mr. Schmidt, a generation of powerful handheld devices is just around the corner that will be adept at surprising you with information that you didn’t know you wanted to know. “The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating—that serendipity—can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically,” Mr. Schmidt says.[...]
On one thing, however, Google is willing to bet: “The only way the problem [of insufficient revenue for news gathering] is going to be solved is by increasing monetization, and the only way I know of to increase monetization is through targeted ads. That’s our business.”[...]
“As you go from the search box [to the next phase of Google], you really want to go from syntax to semantics, from what you typed to what you meant. And that’s basically the role of [Artificial Intelligence]. I think we will be the world leader in that for a long time.”
Students suffer media withdrawal: clue to future of journalism? May 21, 2010
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentRegina McCombs reports: “Students use the language of addiction and withdrawal in talking about their experiences going without technology for 24 hours during a study at the University of Maryland’s Phillip Merrill College of Journalism.
‘I clearly am addicted and the dependency is sickening,’ said one student. ‘Although I started the day feeling good, I noticed my mood started to change around noon. I started to feel isolated and lonely,’ said another. [...]??Students equated technology with media — the phones, iPods, computers, laptops and televisions were just a means to get to information, whether that information was about the world around them, or about their friends. And much of that technology is mobile. Phones in particular [...] ‘A truer mapping of those pathways could provide direction to journalists in their search for relevance in the century ahead’. ”
It’s still early days for journalism to adapt to the networked environment October 31, 2009
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , 1 comment so farSo says Doc Searls, on a panel at Harvard:
"Big newspapers, big magazines, big radio and TV… these are industrial age creatures. Some will persist in the new age that is coming upon us. But they will need to adapt to the new networked environment, where everybody can contribute.
That environment is very new. Think of today as a moment in the early paleozoic, say in Cambrian time. In that context Facebook is a trilobite. Twitter is a bryzoan. The Huffington Post is a primitive sponge. For small-j journalism, this is not the End of Time, but the beginning of it. Will big-J journalism survive? Only if it adapts. While some of that adaptation will be corporate, the leadership won’t be in the corporate system. It will be among the journalists themselves. Just as it was, and still is, with technology companies and the geeks they employ."
Four factors critical to journalism and publishing October 23, 2009
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , 1 comment so farAdam Tinworth flags up social, mobile, real-time, and location-aware technology:
"I think it [this graphic] neatly encapsulated the four issues that will effect the web, and which the publishing business needs to get its head around. I talk a lot about social on here, and the whole hyper-local journalism movement is, to some degree, predicated on the idea of geo-centric technology, even if the potential benefits of geocoding information haven't really been discussed.
The whole mobile environment has been changed by the new breed of smart phones, led by the iPhone, which are turning users into voracious data consumers on the move, and the Real Time web is becoming, in a technological sense, a very real proposition (and, if fact, I should write a post about that).
This graphic is the sort of thing every publisher and journalist should be looking at and thinking "what does this mean for what I do?" "
Three things for newspapers to work on, suggests Google boss Eric Schmidt October 6, 2009
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentFrom his Q&A with The Times:
"Personalize the news – at its best, the on-line version of a newspaper should learn from the information I'm giving it – what I've read, who I am and what I like – to automatically send me stories and photos that will interest me.
Make the content available anywhere – as more "smart" or web-enabled phones hit the market there will be even greater access to what can be considered mobile reading platforms. […]
Embrace journalism as a two-way conversation – the advent of real-time reporting […] means micro-blogging and citizen journalism are here to stay. This phenomenon, combined with the potential benefits to the reader of knowing what their friends or others are reading or saying about events, means newspapers now have a chance to be a 21st century community forum. The more this dialog among and between the newspaper and its readers develops, the greater the opportunity newspapers will have to make money from their content."
Shifting from mass media to individuated media October 2, 2009
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentVin Crosbie highlights the magnitude of the transition he envisages:
"We're now in the early years of this transition from mass media to individuated media, maybe 10 years into a process that will take a generation. The writing is on the wall, but most traditional media companies still think it's only graffiti. Yet the change will come and be sudden and sharp, not gradual. Just ask the newspaper industry, the first to be affected. The radio industry's and the TV industry's affiliate infrastructures will be next. There are pioneers who are ably leading the advertising and public relations industries through the change, but not everyone in those industries will make it to the Promised Land.
If you think you've seen changes in the past 10 to 15 years, you ain't seen nothing yet. […] However, the opportunities to profit and grow careers within individuated media, for those who know how to do it, will be extraordinary. Be one of those people."
Rescuing The Reporters « Clay Shirky October 2, 2009
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentIt's the original, local news reporting that counts, says Clay Shirky, after a 'news biopsy' of his old hometown paper. Six news reporters unearthing valuable stories — with 53 other staff in the newsroom. [NB Shirky includes sport and columnists as 'other'.] His conclusion: around a dozen are critical for the good of the town — and so, if necessary, could be transferred to a non-profit employer.
A journalistic limbo until we reach The New World | Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog September 27, 2009
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentImagined scenarios for online journalism, before we reach the New World (Promised Land, Golden Age etc), by Benji Lanyado:
“1) The paywalls go up, and a black market for scoops emerges
2) The non-paywall sites are damned because they didn’t
3) The fall of ‘quality’ news
4) The rise of ‘all blogosphere’, and the government subsidy solution
5) The New World: Shirky’s vision of a conglomeration of multiple news organisations begins to take shape. A handful of old media names, dramatically reduced in size and scope, survive thanks to government propping. This ‘new BBC’ competes with the vastly augmented blogosphere, and journalism becomes healthy once again.”
>> And they all live happily ever after. At least until the next disruptive technology / economic crisis / cultural shift [insert choice of cause here] …
How Twitter poses a threat to newspapers May 28, 2009
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentThe danger is that Twitter will keep reporters off the streets and in front of their screens, that it will further skew journalism toward seeking out, listening to and serving the young, the hip, the technically sophisticated, the well-off – in short, the better-connected. The people who aren't being heard now aren't sending out tweets.
Journalists must change thinking to change industry | Save the Media April 29, 2009
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentGina Chen on the need for change in journalism:
Much of what gets done in newsrooms is reflexive — done almost without thinking: We do it because we’ve always done it. We do it because that’s what newspapers do. We do it because we don’t want to have to come up with our own ideas. We do it because we don’t want to get blamed if a higher-up complains that we didn’t do it. [...]
I challenge all journalists and bloggers — and I include myself in this — to ask Jarvis’ question — Am I adding value? – before doing anything on the job. In my experience, the hurried newsroom culture doesn’t encourage deep thinking. In my 20 years in a variety of newsrooms, I’ve found decisions on what to cover or how to cover it are often rooted in journalistic routines, which is a fancy way of saying “that’s how we always do it.”