Archive for the ‘Wireless’ Category

Around 1982, the entire staff of The Birmingham News crowded into a room for a mandatory meeting. A consultant — an expert on media trends — held up a copy of the newly created USA Today.

“This,” he said, “is the most thoroughly researched newspaper ever created in America. This is where the industry is going.” The front page was littered with headlines, teasers and graphics. The consultant held up a copy of The Birmingham News next to it. It looked hopelessly gray and old fashioned.

From a technology perspective, the timing was perfect. Like The News, many newspapers had installed offset presses, which made it much easier to use color throughout the paper. And our research had been telling for years that the attention span of readers was growing shorter. USA Today took this research to its logical conclusion, with tons of color and short articles. Soon, our newspaper — like many across the United States — looked a lot like USA Today.

Last week, USA Today itself announced a major overhaul, de-emphasizing its print edition and cutting about 130 workers. Here’s how Editor John Hillkirk described it: “We’ll focus less on print … and more on producing digital content for all platforms.”

According to The Washington Post, USA Today has suffered declines in readership and advertising along with the rest of the industry. Circulation, once the nation’s largest at 2.3 million, is down to 1.83 million, and advertising is down about 50 percent.

“We have to go where the audience is. If people are hitting the iPad like crazy, or the iPhone or other mobile devices, we’ve got to be there with the content they want, when they want it,” Hillkirk said.

While I’ve been suggesting for a couple of years that the future of news was in the handset, I think that matter is settled. Statistics on press releases going out from my agency indicate that the number of people reading the news on handsets may well exceed the number accessing news on desktops and laptops.

There are still a lot of questions, of course. One of the biggest is whether we’ll access the news through handsets or through a browser. Right now, practically every major news outlet has its own app, and my own Android has a bunch of them installed. However, I’m finding that I can zip through the news more quickly by reading pages in a browser, rather than launching a series of apps.

Finally, there’s the question of how and how much we’ll pay for the news content. One school of thought is that we’ll pay for the apps, or perhaps pay a recurring charge to use them. Or the answer could be one of the dozens of payment schemes currently being tested. Or it could well be that we haven’t even hit upon the answer yet.

If you missed the New York times story in Friday’s paper about Apple’s dispute with Google, it’s well worth your time. This is about a lot more than whether flicking a finger will take you to the next news story.

So is Android just an iPhone clone? They certainly share a similar look and feel, but in the past, that hasn’t been enough to win a lawsuit. And if you step back and look at the big picture, this episode looks familiar. Apple gets into the marketplace with an operating system that features a snazzy new interface, but you can only get it by purchasing machines from Apple itself. It doesn’t license the operating system to other companies and keeps everything under its own roof.

A competitor, meanwhile, comes out with a competing operating system that has lots of similarities, but instead of controlling the entire production process, it licenses its software to other companies, who can install it on devices that compete with Apple but cost a lot less.

The Apple system was called Macintosh, and it changed computing forever. Apple was first to market, but today, it has a 5% marketshare, compared to more than 92% for Windows.

Apple’s following its past script of controlling the entire production cycle. You can get an iPhone from anybody you like, long as it’s Apple. Google’s Android system, by contrast, is available to pretty much any phone company that cares to use it. And unlike iPhone, it can run multiple apps. Some prototypes predated iPhone, so it can’t be written off as just a clone.

And because of the open nature of Android, you can get an Android phone for a fraction of the cost of an iPhone, just as today you can get a Windows machine for a fraction of the cost of a Mac.

Interface similarities aren’t enough to win an intellectual property case and keep newer products off the market. If they were, we’d all be using Visicalc or Lotus 123 instead of Microsoft’s Excel. We’d be stuck on the Mosaic browser (which was the first and still is the one that set the standards for how browsers look and feel).

If you don’t mind a Hollywood treatment of the history, check out the 1999 film about the Mac/Windows dispute, Pirates of Silicon Valley.

Like a lot of other people, I wondered if Google was getting carried away when it started selling operating systems for wireless telephones, but within an hour of using my new T-Mobile Android Cliq, it was entirely clear. This is one in a series of steps aimed at eating away at Microsoft’s dominance.

So why am I talking about mobile phones in a media blog? Because the Google strategy is central to how we receive our information – news, texts, email and almost everything else that involves pixels. And by integrating the Android operating system so tightly into its online services, they make it almost impossible not to make Google the center of your life. For example:

• Calendar and addresses. As soon as you finish setting up your phone (including the all-critical step of entering your Google account information), your Contacts directory instantly includes every single person in your Google directory. Since I had already exported all of my 3,000 or so Outlook contacts into Google, I never even had to plug the Android into my USB port.
• Exchange server alternative. Microsoft’s Exchange Server does a lot of nifty stuff, like keeping everybody’s email and calendars in sync.  But it costs at least $2,000 to set up even an entry level Exchange server, and you have to spend at least a few hundred every year on software licenses alone. That’s tough for small businesses to swallow. Google offers a free online application that lets you sync your Google and Outlook calendars in one click. (If you want the whole buffet, their sync product will do practically everything the Exchange Server does for $50 per user.)

For those who were around in the mid 1990s, you’ll recognize echoes of Microsoft’s strategy of dominating the search engine market by integrating Internet Explorer into Windows.  They displaced Netscape because they made it too easy to simply use their product. Google is doing the same thing with the Android mobile operating system.

Can there be any doubt that a Google desktop operating system is in the cards?

As noted repeatedly over the last couple of years, I’ve been struggling for quite a while to identify the future business model that will ensure the continuity of the quality reporting that makes our form of democracy possible.

Since the bloodshed we saw in the first quarter of 2009, all sorts of ideas have emerged — micropayments, low-rate subscriptions, you name it. But for the first time in a couple of years I’m ready to venture a guess (that’s all it is) as to what shape it may take, and I think it has little or nothing to do with your desktop and even your laptop.

I now think it will be driven by a future generation of hardware. If I knew what it would look like and had a few billion dollars to develop it, I’d be the next Bill Gates. But I’m thinking it will be some hybrid between two products now on the market: Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPhone. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been thinking lately that the next big advance in media will be in the handheld market space. Apparently I’m not the only one. I’m working on a major post about what shape that will take, and the iPhone has to be a contender. Advertising Age story.

It’s been a while since I commented on the problems with accuracy and perspective resulting from trying to funnel “breaking news” to the audience as soon as it happens. It’s been a problem for the news channels, especially Fox and CNN, for years. We stay glued to the set during a major news event and hear all the trivia, but at the end of the day, we have no idea what really mattered.

Journalists tend to follow each other around, because none wants an editor asking why he missed a story someone else had. (It never occurs to them that the only way to get a story that’s uniquely theirs is to go their own way, but that’s another issue.)

And when they can read each other’s tweets and pass them on without any fact checking, it gets even worse. This article by Marc Gunther gives a great example. Why Twitter Can Be Bad for Journalism.

Media tremors–the earth is shifting | CNET News.com

By Harry Fuller
http://news.com.com/Media+tremors-the+earth+is+shifting/2010-1025_3-6192734.htmlStory last modified Fri Jun 22 11:09:09 PDT 2007

While our planet’s tectonic plates move in geological time, the media landscape is now shifting in Internet time.

Today’s media giant is tomorrow’s hollow shell. In 1999 there was the Viacom-CBS merger. That lasted six years. We’re all old enough to remember that halcyon moment when AOL and Time-Warner merged to form what was at that time the biggest media company in the world. That’s was back in January 2001.

Meanwhile, Google was still a private tech start-up in Silicon Valley. It didn’t even go public until August 2004. On Wall Street, it’s been a huge hit. But weaknesses are showing. Google is not winning in the world’s largest Internet market, China.

Apparently, Rupert Murdoch is interested in owning Dow Jones. This is the same Dow Jones that just predicted a majority of its 2009 revenue will come from its digital services, not traditional print. And nobody wants AOL, so Time Warner is struggling to find a new business model for this Internet pioneer.

That brings us to a few things that have just happened or are about to happen.

Two Bay Area newspapers, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury-News, recently announced major layoffs. Yahoo just ditched its very expensive, media-savvy CEO. And in August, the BigTen Network will launch.

Each of these three events carries its own seismic implications.

Newspaper layoffs are now like laptop battery recalls or poison chemicals from China. Yeah, so what’s new? What’s new is that there’s no turning back.

Print industry insiders now know this and admit it, sadly and privately. Craigslist gutted the newspapers’ old business model by coming up with easy and efficient classified advertising. Now newspapers are stuck trying to sell content. Not an easy thing to do in the Internet age. Many major dailies are still trying to figure out how to merge online and print staffs. Too little, way too late. I don’t need a local paper for the movie listings anymore; it’s more efficient to find them online. Suburban newspapers with sharp local focus may continue to do OK. But big metro dailies will become nonprofits like your local museum or opera company. Or they’ll simply fade away, another relic. Meanwhile The New York Times, USA Today and The Washington Post endeavor to become national newspapers and Web sites. In that arena, they must compete with TV news networks, Yahoo News, Google News and the blogosphere.

Yahoo, like AOL, was an early powerhouse on the Internet. It outlived other search engines like Excite and Lycos. It became more inclusive than AOL, which foolishly assumed Internet users could be confined in a walled garden. But Yahoo lost the search battle to Google and then generally lost its way.

It didn’t buy major league talent to compete with cable TV but pretended to be a content company. Yahoo has no Jon Stewart, no Sopranos. Yahoo didn’t develop superior community sites, but it wanted to be a community center. It bought Flickr, one of the better photo-sharing services, but it has myriad competitors.
Now on News.com
Yahoo’s board may also get a makeover Portable power from trash Newsmaker: ARM says it’s ready for the iPhone Extra: iPhone: The device IT managers will love to hate

Yahoo is now a set of widely used tools: e-mail, IM, Flickr. Is it simply a tool company? Can Yahoo be rejuvenated? Does Yahoo go the way of Western Union, now pared down to simply wiring money around the globe? Can you even send a telegram now? Who cares?

Finally, there is the upcoming launch of the BigTenNetwork, which will carry football games of some very popular Midwestern universities. BigTen will also produce other sports and university-related programs, some of it to be delivered via the Internet. This pulls content from traditional TV channels.

Major League Baseball already offers a series of online subscription packages to bring fans games from cities where they don’t live. Thus, major sports franchises and revenue sources become more and more independent. They no longer need traditional TV to deliver their content and skim off some of the huge ad revenue.

The aftershocks will reverberate across the media landscape. Revenue drains away from TV networks and stations, as well as from radio. And those TV folks lose one more way of promoting their other content to an increasingly elusive male demographic.

Smaller staffs at TV networks and stations will be the result, echoing newspaper cutbacks. Will Channel X ever convince some 30-year-old male to watch its programming if sports highlights are online, his favorite team is on his iPhone, and the weather forecast is on a thousand Web sites?

That’s a rhetorical question, as we watch the continually shrinking ratings and clout of old-time media.

As these media quakes continue to hit–large or small, but inevitable–they are changing the media landscape as surely as the forces that lifted the Rockies. In the resulting environment, not every media critter will survive.

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The phone company dropped off this year’s new white pages a couple of weeks ago. They were about two inches thick, and apparently the delivery service came by after hours. So they were waiting on the doorstep when the tenants of my building arrived.

In part out of a sense of obligation (I used to work for the phone company), I adopted one of these orphan doorstops, and I counted the ones remaining. I made a conscious decision to leave the others and see how much demand there was for the old paper product. Apparently, there was none. They lay there for two weeks before I finally gathered them up and headed for the recycling bin.

The delivery of the new phone directories used to be a big deal. The newspapers wrote stories about them. People immediately snatched them up to make sure their numbers were correct. My guess is that there are three factors in the rampant disinterest in the phone book these days:

• Size/clumsiness. Sure, you’re screwed if the Internet connection goes down, but I can look up 10 numbers on Switchboard.com in the time it takes me to even find the paper phone book.
• Lack of immediacy. In a world where we expect everything to be updated hourly, the idea of an annual reference seems almost quaint. In practice, I doubt it matters much, but it’s a mental thing.
• The wireless factor. I have two grown children, neither of whom has a wireline phone. The phone book doesn’t cover cell phones. Increasingly, that makes it irrelevant. This isn’t a “paper versus online” problem. But it is a very real issue. Until pretty recently, the phone book (or its online analog) was how you found people. With more people ditching their wirelines, that’s no longer possible. Maybe that’s the point.

Virginia Tech’s Use of New Media Tools Exemplary

By David Henderson, Author, Making News

In the aftermath of the worst and most horrific handgun-killing spree in America’s history, there should be no second-guessing or Monday morning quarterbacking the crisis communications of Virginia Tech University. By any standard, it was exemplary and should set new standards for clear and concise crisis communications using the tools of New Media.

By midday on Monday, March 16, Virginia Tech’s website was being updated constantly with information, alerts, directions and resources. The university had posted the first of what would be the first of many podcasts of statements from officials, including Tech’s president, Charles W. Steger.

Within just a few hours, the university had taken charge of its communications and was speaking with a clear and consistent voice. Even before the deeply sorrowful task of identifying the dead, those few early updates that the university had were immediately communicated to the information needs of students, faculty, parents, the Blacksburg community and the world. There was no speculation, just facts.

With the experience of years both as a journalist and in strategic communications worldwide, I have never before witnessed an organization communicate more effectively during a tragedy and crisis of such a scale than Virginia Tech. What struck me most was how the leadership of the university managed to respond so quickly and in such an efficient manner at a time when shock and grief tends to be overwhelming.

Tuesday morning, Tech President Steger was being interviewed by NBC’s Matt Lauer on the “Today” show. Even though Lauer pushed for an explanation why the university had not “locked down” (a prison term that is unfortunately applied to our schools) the entire campus, Steger stuck to clear, logical and consistent messages. He explained to Lauer that with over 26,000 students, Virginia Tech has the population of many towns, and it would not be responsible to impulsively over-react without knowing all the facts. He gave an exceptional interview to the talk show host, a former entertainment reporter at VH-1, who didn’t quite seem to comprehend.

At the same time, Virginia Tech’s site had been given over completely to reflect the gravity of events. The university’s normal site was gone, and a new site provided even more information, often updated every few minutes, about news, memorials and events.

The site—which reflected simplicity and clarity—had been divided into three sections: at the top, a series of remarkable photographs with quotes from leaders; at the bottom, one section labeled “The Latest” and another under the heading, “Resources/Related Content.” In the latter, there was a new section, among many, that guided students and faculty to grief counseling services.

This was not a stereotypical example of a “dark site” brought to life, as some PR agencies promote. VT-dot-edu was new in response to a crisis of unbelievable proportions and reflected both the impact of what had happened and responsibly provided information leadership to the university community. Most of all, it was credible.

By clicking on a link, you were taken to the site’s “back-end” that was using blog and HTML technology for instantaneous updates by multiple people. There were transcripts and streaming audio and video, and, yes, you could find elements of the university’s normal site. It is unprecedented in the history of crisis communications on the Internet.

Here’s the important part: It was all being done within the university by a team of students and administrators working around the clock and somehow finding the inner strength to manage their grief and emotions with a commitment to communicate accurately with the world.

From Bulldog Reporter’s Daily Dog

From the Project for Excellence in Journalism (journalism.org):

A new Pew survey may offer some good news to a journalism industry eagerly seeking new and younger customers. People in the rapidly growing ranks of wireless Internet users are more likely to retrieve news online than those who access the web in other ways.The study—conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in December 2006 and released last week—finds that a third (34%) of all online adults in the U.S. have now logged onto the Internet using a wireless connection, such as a laptop computer, cell phone, or a personal digital assistant (PDA) such as a Palm Pilot, BlackBerry or Treo.

Not only has that number grown by an impressive 36% in the past two years, but it also includes a sizeable segment of young people. According to the survey, almost a third of wireless online users are between the ages and 18 and 29.

The survey reported that the most popular wireless device is the laptop, with roughly four in ten (39%) online users owning one. Just 13% of online users have a PDA, and 25% say they have cell phones with wireless capacity

The report also found that nearly half (46%) of all wireless users go online for news on a typical day. This percentage surpasses those who go online for news using a broadband connection (38%). That appears to be a significant finding because previous research has generally found that broadband users were the heaviest online news consumers.

This data may offer some guidance for news organizations looking to reach more consumers, especially in the face of mounting evidence that more Americans are now going without news altogether. Polling data from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that 19% of all Americans said they got no news at all on a typical day in 2006, up from nine percent in 1994. And that trend was most pronounced among young Americans aged 18 to 29.

John Horrigan, the author of the Pew report, is optimistic that the research could lead media companies to invest more in news content delivered over wireless devices. “Those who use mobile devices to get news are valuable customers to begin with, and it would make sense to provide content optimized for these devices,” he told PEJ. It might also suggest one way to capture some of the younger audience that the news industry is so eager to attract.

Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project