Technology & Journalism, Pt 3

There are good and bad futures of journalism, and we’ll likely see a mix. Going the bad route first, let’s talk about ownership. Only three out of the top ten media giants in the world own newspapers – Cox Enterprises, Bertelsmann, and News Corp.

They own papers outside the United States, where the death of print isn’t quite so forthcoming. The majority are entertainment companies and may not understand the public interest to which newspapers serve. All ten companies are publicly owned and have a business-oriented bottom line, and the criticism is drawn that they may allow newspapers to die.

So what does lay in store for print? Time Inc. is unveiling a new publication called mine. The magazine tries to mimic a personalized news feed, drawing content from eight publications. It is a five-issue, ten-week experiment limited to 31,000 print copies and 200,000 online editions, featuring 36 total pages and four full pages of personalized ads for the Lexus 2010 RX sport utility vehicle.

“A sample ad tag line for a respondent named Dave, who lives in Los Angeles and eats sushi, might read: ‘Hey Dave, your friends will be really impressed when you drive down Van Ness Avenue on your way to get sushi.’” The cost of the personalized ads in mine doesn’t cost more than regular ads, but may be worth the effort if it means greater action from the consumer, said David Nordstrom, Lexus' vice president of marketing.

But who says journalism’s future lies in print? The Daily News in LA, put out by MediaNews Group, will be a personalized, newspaper look-a-like PDF file available for download on computers and mobile phones where readers can choose specific stories, authors, keywords, or subjects to read about. The News features personalized advertisements like Time’s mine.

Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab is skeptical that print media can keep up with the Internet in terms of customization, but that they are worth trying out. He likened the MediaNews innovation to a radio gadget that sent out a facsimile newspaper in 1939…and flopped.

E-readers are also pegged as the potential future. These devices have been around for nearly a decade, says Josh Quittner, but nobody really took notice until Amazon released its Kindle over a year ago. The devices need a high-speed network to download text of any kind – print, magazine and the like. The Kindle 2, priced at $359, is still not as good as cheap paper. But just as the automobile replaced the horse and the PC replaced the typewriter, Quittner says nobody got it right on the first try and that these updates took time.

“Any new technology must be ten times as good as the thing it seeks to replace.” He says everybody wants the iPod of e-readers, saying that Apple has done well with their MP3 player and its symbiotic relationship with iTunes, as well as its iPhone App Store.

Isaacson would agree with this, saying that he thinks micropayments should be what people use to purchase content, like they were when the Web was new the to the public. He says a simple interface would allow impromptu purchases, with the revenue helping out traditional newspapers and struggling citizen journalists and bloggers.

Currently, e-readers (specifically the Kindle) aren’t being adopted well. Benton says as a technology guy who loves books, he hasn’t seen a Kindle in the flesh, so to speak, in its fifteen months of existence.

Spending time at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference, hosting technology-geared people who sought to learn the fundamentals of e-publishing, only 1 in 8 of those he surveyed had a Kindle. One in two had an iPhone, and maybe 1 in 3 had a Twitter account. No sales numbers for the Kindle have been announced.

Certainly, journalism and technology have meshed in places and clashed in others. This presentation seemed easy enough at the start, but was a real eye-opener to me in terms of depth when I think about the fact that gobs of people write about this kind of stuff everyday, information and sources that I didn’t want to include because of the proverbial bag of worms it would open.

Journalism has come a long way in a relatively short period of time. Where it goes from here is anybody’s guess as one can’t predict the future. But it has a lot of creativity to include facets from several areas discussed here and coming down the pipe in the future. Journalism survived radio, and it survived television, and will find a way to survive amidst the technology presently reaching for its affection.