In honor of Social Media Week (#smw11), Dorian (@dbenk) and others @teemingmedia are tweeting about everything from valuations of media companies in the social age, to how to promote books through Twitter, Facebook and more.
They also give some links to some of their resources, readings and tools.
What is Design Now?
One of the things I love about working with talented people on a variety of dynamic digital media projects is that it makes me rethink basic concepts.
Designer Roger Black has gotten me to do that with his blog post on Treesaver, the company he and Filipe Fortes founded last year that I'm helping with business and communication strategy and execution. Treesaver is, at its heart, a way for publishers to streamline the publishing process and much more easily produce content for every screen and device without having to creat a website, then an iPad app, then an aAndroid app, then a tablet app and so on. It's all based on HTML5 which pretty much works on any reasonably new device with a browser.
Roger, whose imprint is on some of the most heralded publications and websites in the world (Esquire, MSNBC.com to name just two), asks what design is in the digital age and in what ways designers have to turn their thinking around if they're not working in a fixed width, blank page. Even Web designers, Roger notes, tend to create their sites for computer screens in a fixed width.
But with what's known as "adaptive layout," the Web page will be adjusted for whatever screen size you're reading on. Someone may be accessing your content on one screen at this moment, another screen the next. The text may cascade into 3 columns here, 2 columns there, and photos may be positioned here, there, or nowhere depending on the screen or device.
What if you, as a publisher, can control a lot of aspects -- think through the fonts, colors, logos, images -- but have to accept a level of fluidity as well?
This is a next generation of thinking and design. We are, with tablet devices and more media consumption on screens, moving beyond the clunky link-and-blink image-laden websites that put design in the background. We're moving beyond an era when someone designs for a Web page, and then separately for mobile sites, apps and so on. We're getting at a time when everything from font and gradations of color can be thought of and brought to life, again, with the pleasure of reading brought to a screen, but without losing the functionality (linking, embedding, interactivity, social layers) that HTML allows.
The effects of all this can be rather subtle to the consumer. How does the design of, say, The National Enquirer communicate a different message than The New York Times? Does the website of a typical publication reflect its design? What about its mobile site or apps? What functions do you want to preserve? Is the design part of the information, the experience?
It's another layer of input, a new way of thinking, and a cross between flexibility and control for publishers and users.
Designer Roger Black has gotten me to do that with his blog post on Treesaver, the company he and Filipe Fortes founded last year that I'm helping with business and communication strategy and execution. Treesaver is, at its heart, a way for publishers to streamline the publishing process and much more easily produce content for every screen and device without having to creat a website, then an iPad app, then an aAndroid app, then a tablet app and so on. It's all based on HTML5 which pretty much works on any reasonably new device with a browser.
Roger, whose imprint is on some of the most heralded publications and websites in the world (Esquire, MSNBC.com to name just two), asks what design is in the digital age and in what ways designers have to turn their thinking around if they're not working in a fixed width, blank page. Even Web designers, Roger notes, tend to create their sites for computer screens in a fixed width.
But with what's known as "adaptive layout," the Web page will be adjusted for whatever screen size you're reading on. Someone may be accessing your content on one screen at this moment, another screen the next. The text may cascade into 3 columns here, 2 columns there, and photos may be positioned here, there, or nowhere depending on the screen or device.
What if you, as a publisher, can control a lot of aspects -- think through the fonts, colors, logos, images -- but have to accept a level of fluidity as well?
This is a next generation of thinking and design. We are, with tablet devices and more media consumption on screens, moving beyond the clunky link-and-blink image-laden websites that put design in the background. We're moving beyond an era when someone designs for a Web page, and then separately for mobile sites, apps and so on. We're getting at a time when everything from font and gradations of color can be thought of and brought to life, again, with the pleasure of reading brought to a screen, but without losing the functionality (linking, embedding, interactivity, social layers) that HTML allows.
The effects of all this can be rather subtle to the consumer. How does the design of, say, The National Enquirer communicate a different message than The New York Times? Does the website of a typical publication reflect its design? What about its mobile site or apps? What functions do you want to preserve? Is the design part of the information, the experience?
It's another layer of input, a new way of thinking, and a cross between flexibility and control for publishers and users.
Ken Auletta on Larry Page's Challenges as Google CEO
New Yorker writer Ken Auletta, as qualified as anyone to give an intelligent take on what's going on with the Google management change (Google it, if you don't know):
"It was always assumed that one day Page would be C.E.O. Now that he is about to be, he will have to change. He is a very private man, who often in meetings looks down at his hand-held Android device, who is not a comfortable public speaker, who hates to have a regimented schedule, who thinks it is an inefficient use of his time to invest too much of it in meetings with journalists or analysts or governments. As C.E.O., the private man will have to become more public. And he will have to rid himself of a proclivity most engineers have: they are really bad at things they can’t measure. Like fears about Google’s size, and privacy and copyright and how to deal with governments that are weak at measurement but rife with paranoia."
Ken's take has consistently been that the Google guys' Achilles heal is their inability to deal with the softer, more emotional sides of the business. His analysis here might be right. Page may, as Schmidt said, be ready to lead. Perhaps that really is a factor in Schmidt's moving to his new role as Page assumed the helm.. And I'm not sure if one can put such an important management change on one factor, such as the Google moves in China. But Ken's take is worth looking at.
News Desk: Why Is Eric Schmidt Stepping Down at Google? : The New Yorker:
"It was always assumed that one day Page would be C.E.O. Now that he is about to be, he will have to change. He is a very private man, who often in meetings looks down at his hand-held Android device, who is not a comfortable public speaker, who hates to have a regimented schedule, who thinks it is an inefficient use of his time to invest too much of it in meetings with journalists or analysts or governments. As C.E.O., the private man will have to become more public. And he will have to rid himself of a proclivity most engineers have: they are really bad at things they can’t measure. Like fears about Google’s size, and privacy and copyright and how to deal with governments that are weak at measurement but rife with paranoia."
Ken's take has consistently been that the Google guys' Achilles heal is their inability to deal with the softer, more emotional sides of the business. His analysis here might be right. Page may, as Schmidt said, be ready to lead. Perhaps that really is a factor in Schmidt's moving to his new role as Page assumed the helm.. And I'm not sure if one can put such an important management change on one factor, such as the Google moves in China. But Ken's take is worth looking at.
News Desk: Why Is Eric Schmidt Stepping Down at Google? : The New Yorker:
My Baby Wrote me On Twitter
The Takeaway asked for songs that'd be different if there weren't phones, and we were in this age. Here's a joking lyric I did to the tune of the old Clearance Clearwater song "My Baby Wrote me a Letter."
Others from The Takeaway
Give me a ticket for an airplane
Ain’t got time for a fast train
Lonely days are gone
I’m a goin home
My baby wrote on Twitter
She wrote me on Twitter and said she couldn’t live w/out me no more
But in 140 letters I didn’t learn very much more
Anyway
Email and Texts tell me what she do
Facebook and Foursquare give me more of her news
Lonely days are gone
I’m a goin home
My baby wrote on Twitter
Ain’t got time for a fast train
Lonely days are gone
I’m a goin home
My baby wrote on Twitter
She wrote me on Twitter and said she couldn’t live w/out me no more
But in 140 letters I didn’t learn very much more
Anyway
Email and Texts tell me what she do
Facebook and Foursquare give me more of her news
Lonely days are gone
I’m a goin home
My baby wrote on Twitter
A little bit of levity on a busy and otherwise serious day.
Others from The Takeaway
"Text Me"
"I Just Facebooked to Say I Love You"
"Jenny I've Got Your Email (sted number)"
Skiing, Snow, Media and Mobile
About 15 years ago, during another big New York snowstorm, a Japanese TV crew caught me skiing up 8th Avenue from my then-apartment toward Central Park. I wouldn't have known about it, except one of my best friends, who is in Japan, asked if that could have been me skiing. (When he described it, I knew it was.)
Today, in another big snow dump, I had a very different, more communal, less surprising, and much more shared media experience. Skiing down Broadway then in Madison Square Park for a work break, I must have had my picture shot about about a dozen times. One couple told me they were from Barcelona. A Finnish man who MMS'd me the photo noted that Helsinki was similar in look to New York today. A blond woman who said she wasn't from New York shared another photo via email. An Indian mom and daughter chatted me up, asking if I was afraid to damage the skis on pavement.
It occurred to me how the image of my skiing on NY streets was shared to a wider group, geographically, with greater ease, and how easy it was for me to get a copy. How a larger number of people likely saw the video on Japanese broadcast TV, but that it got on the air that time through the filter of a cameraman who decided to shoot it, and a separate editorial chain all the way until air, and that the only personal connection happened when my friend happened to be watching, and gave me a call.
It occurred to me how much more communal the experience was today due to the media technology in everyone's hand and how I am now at least nominally connected a couple of them. Seeing those folks shooting my picture gave me a reason to talk to them, and them to me.
New world. I kinda like it.
Answering Kramer on the Future of Media
While I could quibble with Larry Kramer (@lkramer) on some of the finer points in his Seeking Alpha essay The Future of Media Gradually Coming Into Focus I agree with what he's saying.
When Larry says "media," he means largely text and non-fiction media. He says that editorially digital media are moving toward finding quality and authoritative voice and that there's no one business model, that there need to multiple revenue streams.
I would add that it's even better if there are multiple, offsetting revenue streams that represent different kinds of cashflows, work better in different conditions such as a strong or weak ad market and so on. There also has to be vigorous understanding and control of costs, with a willingness to spend on what really matters. For example, your coding operation today is as, if not more, important than your printing plants and distribution systems ever were. So are folks who can do great journalism that is honest, open and involves the community. And journalists and editors who understand a bit of how to market their work (social media, of course, is the 800-lb gorilla right now).
I would also add that media organizations have to have the skills of entrepreneurs: nimbleness, a willingness to try new things, a willingness, above all, to ask what Ken Auletta, in his book on Google calls, the engineer's way: Asking why things have to be the way they are. Can they be improved? For example, why does or should even a news organization make most prominent whatever happens to be most recent, in typical bloggish fashion. Can't, as Gawker and others Larry notes are now doing, they show some judgment and curation? On the revenue side, what is appropriate separation of editorial and commercial content? How far can you go to let advertisers into the mix, while still being transparent to users about what's happening (such as the "ad/slants" advertorial copy of True/Slant, now Forbes; or some attempts at Tina Brown's Daily Beast).
The big question I have -- and one I work every day to try to solve -- is whether the mix of new revenue streams and decreased costs of production and distribution can meet at a breakeven model. Every moment, there is downward pressure on ad pricing, and it has yet to be proven subscriptions can work. The landscape is flooded with events. Technology is relatively easy to produce but harder to sell. But there is, surely a bright side and we're starting to figure it out. I took a lot of grief (and was nevertheless happy for the "engagement" ) when I wrote on PBS MediaShift that journalism is getting better in many ways. I'm glad Larry sees hope as well. Now, I'm going to have to get his book, C-Scape, and see what prescriptions he gives.
ProPublica and Jay Rosen Team Up
"NYU media guru Jay Rosen is announcing a new partnership between his Studio 20 graduate students and ProPublica. Their goal is to research the most effective ways to unravel complex problems for an online audience, and then build new kinds of explainers to illuminate ProPublica’s research into issues like the foreclosure crisis, finance, healthcare, and the BP oil spill.
"It’s an ambitious project, and one that fits Rosen’s goal of transforming journalism schools into the R&D labs of the media industry."
"It’s an ambitious project, and one that fits Rosen’s goal of transforming journalism schools into the R&D labs of the media industry."
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