Talking about Apple on KUSI News

It seemed highly likely, this past Thursday morning, that Apple's market capitalization was going to break through $1 trillion. When I saw that milestone quickly approaching, I sent an e-mail to a local news station which opened with the following:

I am a retired Apple employee (1998 – 2007) here in San Diego and I’d like to make myself available to KUSI for an interview about Apple since that company reached, and surpassed, a $1 trillion market valuation, this morning.

Nine minutes later, I received a response, "Thank you for your email. Would you be available to appear on our 5pm newscast tonight?"

Wow! That was quick. Of course I accepted their offer.

A few people asked me if I was paid for my appearance. News organizations do not pay or compensate guests for information to avoid any conflicts of interest – that's basic journalism ethics. However, many news organizations will pay for photos or videos. 

Yesterday's Mediocre Newspapers, Today's Ad Servers

It seems that yesterday's mediocre newspapers are today's most prolific ad servers, with clickbait (yellow journalism) websites jumping on the bandwagon. I get it... I understand that news sites need to make money, which they do with ads. But, print news ads were never intrusive or intertwined within articles as current news websites are, today.

Nowadays, I visit my local newspaper's website and I'm playing whack-a-mole as I x-out pop-up ads. Then, after reading about a dozen stories, I end up needing to either go into private browser mode or use Safari's Reader Mode (shift-command-R) to get around their paywall (the latter only works on unsophisticated news sites).

I understand why newspapers need to do this and it's a tough business they're in because nearly all the news on their website can be found elsewhere. Plus, consumers aren't used to paying for news, making it even harder to charge for online subscriptions. Paying for a newspaper subscription was a different story in the "old days" since the customer was buying atoms (a product, the physical newspaper), not electrons (a service, the online news).

The thing about newspapers is they, in particular, had an atypical revenue model before ten years ago.  Back then, their revenue came primarily from business display ads and consumer classifieds. Interestingly enough, while home subscriptions contributed to their revenue, it did so in an odd way. Specifically, newspaper companies realized that each time they raised the price of their newspaper, subscriptions would drop off. But, even though the newspaper was generating less revenue from subscriptions, in the short term, they kept their display ads and classified ads prices the same. Therefore, they'd generate the same revenue from their primary source (ads) while printing fewer newspapers. Then, their sales people would start calling up former subscribers and new customers to get them to subscribe.

What About 24 Hour TV News?

I get virtually all of my news online, almost all in print, because I don't have a TV. The nice thing about getting my news all in print is that, until an article is updated, there no new news to report. Whereas, on TV, the news stations will rebroadcast the same video footage, repeatedly, while having experts speculate on matters. Additionally, TV news programs frequently add video and sound effects (moving backgrounds, swooshing graphics, music, slow-motion video, etc); none of which is vital to the facts of the news story. Watching the same harrowing video, on TV, over and over again, does nothing to ease the public's angst. As a matter of fact, it makes it worse; to the point of addiction, especially in cases of terrorism.

Q: So, what's the best thing to do to deal with news, especially on terrorism?

A: Watch this Vox video...

Blogging: The First 20 Years

Twenty years ago, today, the father of blogging, Dave Winer, published his first blog post. Back then, it wasn't called a blog or web log. That came later. But its original purpose hasn't changed. Winer, more than anyone else, has preached and practiced that the purpose of blogging is to narrate one's work.

Blogging is fundamentally different than journalism, but there's also an overlap. There's so much of an overlap that Pulitzer awarded the Huffington Post its National Reporting prize in 2012. The prize was awarded for journalism coverage. The coverage was posted on a blog that grew into a news service. News services have blogs and blogs provide news services. Twitter, more than any other company, has seized this opportunity as a micro-blog, news service, and communications platform.

There's both a human and technical element which causes high-tech services to reach the masses. On the technical side, webifying a technology makes it more accessible. Twitter webified RSS, Hotmail webified SMTP, and blogging platforms like Wordpress and Blogger have webified FTP. But it's the human element that's key. These services, plus Podcasts, social media, and comments, etc, allow people to express themselves. It's the very act of expressing ourselves that is our passion. Plus, these webified technologies are truly innovative. Innovation is something that reduces the cost of a transaction. And well designed technology will get out of your way to enhance your productivity. 

Without realizing it, we've seen these changes over the past two decades. Adam Curry, a former MTV VJ, once explained to me how he persuaded Winer to solve the Internet video broadcast problem. Fifteen years ago, video didn't stream, it downloaded due to slow bandwidth. It might take five minutes to download a sixty-second news broadcast that was the size of a postage stamp. Winer had no interest in this user experience until Curry suggested "channels." These channels would download news broadcasts in the middle of the night, while you slept. A light went off in Winer's head when he realized that these channels should be RSS feeds with MP3 or video links. This was the birth of the podcast feed format. What's beautiful about this example is that Winer recorded it for the world to see. He didn't document it only because it was a breakthrough, he documented as just another day at the office.

Winer narrates his work on many levels. Sometimes it's on a human level, like his description of how he and Curry came up with the idea for podcasting. Other times, it's on a technical level such as his step-by-step guide, EC2 for Poets, which demonstrates how a non-technical person can get a server up and running within an hour.

Whether you agree or disagree with Winer, don't simply tweet him, "You're wrong." Instead, write a blog post and point him to it. You'll be amazed how much you'll learn in the process. Winer's been wrong many times. And he's been wrong about being wrong. Winer initially said the iPad had too many shortcomings. He was on Facebook, then off Facebook, and now he's back on Facebook because he's realized its potential as a publishing platform. He's not afraid to publicize his thoughts for debate and discussion. If the sign of strength is adaptability, then the sign of intelligence and humility is the ability to recognize when we're wrong. Now go forth and narrate your work. 

When the News is Virtual

San Diego video artist Cy Kuckenbaker.

I heard this piece on KPBS while driving a couple days ago. It's about a San Diego video artist who spends up to two hours editing for each second of video he produces. You've probably seen his work.

What's interesting is his art is displayed on his website, cysfilm.com, yet the KPBS reporter makes no mention of this fact. Instead, the reporter directs you to kpbs.org.

Obviously, the goal of KPBS is to direct listeners from the audio program, since that's their primary medium, to their website to generate revenue via ads. So, I somehow feel that a key portion of the reporting is missing, specifically where Kuckenbaker's art is on display.

Imagine an article about the Mono Lisa on exhibit in San Diego without any mention of where it will be displayed other than, "You can see it for yourself at kpbs.org."

Author: Joe Moreno

Blogging vs Journalism

Journalism, meet blogging:
Writing a personal blog post on 5/20/12 that CNN reported on.

What's the difference between blogging and journalism?

There's a perception that journalists tend to look down on bloggers since the bar to blog is low. Anyone can become a blogger - simply set up a free blog and write whatever you please. If you blog on a semi-regular basis then, congratulations, you're now, officially, a bona fide blogger.

Journalists, on the other hand, tend to be paid professionals - backed by a corporation with proofreaders and fact-checkers - whereas all but a few bloggers do it pro bono (or receive a trivial amount of incidental ad revenue).

Key Difference
I, having been both a paid and unpaid journalist and blogger, noticed one key difference between blogging and journalism...

Journalist tend to report the facts and interview (quote) witnesses. To put a fine point on it, journalists report what witnesses say.

Bloggers, on the other hand, tend to write essays from their personal point of view. Many times, if a blogger does quote a witness, the witness was probably not speaking directly to the author (i.e. the blogger heard the quote on T.V. or Twitter, etc.)

(Side note: Is this the future of reporting, complete with witness citations?)

Bloggers tend to write in first (I) or second (you) person. Journalist tend to write in third person with first hand quotes from witnesses.

These key differences are not hard and fast rules, they're simply generalizations.

Let's look at it a different way. How many blog posts have quotes from multiple first hand witnesses expressing different opinions? Not many.

Just to be clear, I am, in no way, favoring journalism over blogging, or vice versa; rather, I'm simply pointing out a key difference between the two.

Purpose
Rather than debate whether journalism is more important than blogging, it's best to realize that each serve a different purpose.

The purpose of journalism is to report the facts and record events for a (daily) historic purpose. Many regularly scheduled publications are official newspapers of record - in other words, a private or public company authorized by the government to publish public or legal notices. (Conversely, I am not aware of any "blog of record" which serves this purpose.)

While blogs can have many different purposes, their best use, as Dave Winer has described for more than a decade, is to "Narrate your work." You can think of blogs as both professional diaries for discussion and debate as well as a place for describing personal experiences.

Neither a single news article can define journalism nor a single post define blogging. Rather, it's left as an exercise for the reader.

The Future of Digital Publications

I have seen the future of digital publications and it looks like Flipboard and Livestand.

The challenge of distributing digital books has already been solved with the Kindle and iBooks. But, reading a book is a different experience than reading a digital newspaper or magazine. Books are read linearly whereas newspapers and periodicals are flipped through. While we might read a magazine article from beginning to end, how we discovered that article could have been through the random process of flipping.

Bad

I belong to two large associations which have both tried to distribute their magazines in a digital format. The problem is that both associations have chosen to use solutions like NXTbook or Issuu. Once you get to a page that you want to read you have to click to zoom in because the text is too small to read when viewing the entire page. Actually, each page isn't really text - rather it's a screenshot of the magazine's artwork - so you can't search for text, easily, or copy and paste it. If it's a multicolumn article, you then have to pan back up to the top next column to continue reading. These solutions are basically an online version of microfilm.

There are several other problems with this user experience. First, the magazine rendering is CPU intensive, so it's slow to initialize, turn pages, and it doesn't work well on older computers. Also, since it's just screen shots of the magazine pages, there's no multimedia such as video or audio.

This solution is a clear cut example of a case that violated a key rule in UI/UX: Start with the UX and then work back to the technology.

Good

The Daily and Project provide good user experiences since they're designed specifically for the iPad and they have rich multimedia. However, the content can only be displayed on the iPad. If you send an article from The Daily to someone without an iPad, all that the recipient will see is a humongous screen shot of the entire article as rendered on the iPad.

Better

Flipboard currently provides the best experience that I've seen. I love that I can read a blog, using Flipboard, simply by pointing it at the blog's Twitter stream or Google Reader.

There are two distinct ways in which publication media is distributed and consumed. One way is through batch publication, such as a daily or monthly publication. Both The Daily and Project use this technique. The other way is through continuous updates, i.e. a river of news, such as most blogs, CNN.com, etc.

The problem with batch publishing is that you can't easily go back to a previous issue's article. If you missed it, then you missed it. The nice thing about a river of news is that you can back up in your river to pickup where you left off.

Best

The ideal solution is an open format (such as RSS or ePub) so that the content can be best displayed depending on the medium. Consuming a slightly customized RSS feed via an application similar to Flipboard is how I envision the implementation - let's call it a Digital Publication Feed (DPF).

It would work by pointing a Flipboard-like application at a web site for automatic detection of the DPF (similar to how my web browser automatically finds the RSS feed when visiting cnn.com). The DPF would be an RSS feed standardized for the digital publishing industry with a few special tags, such as <hed>, <dek>, <byline>, <lead>, <text>, <video>, <audio>, plus other metadata to give any third party consuming application the ability to render news articles. There could even be tags for handling comments and ad revenue sharing.

The DPF is a fairly simple concept, but the beauty is that it would work well across different devices and, most importantly, it would be a standard.

Worst

While generating ad revenue is vital, it's important that ads don't get out of control. Leading newspapers don't plaster ads on the front page of their printed papers. Yet, if you look at the newspaper industry's attempts to monetize the web you'll find web sites where a single article stretches across multiple pages for the sole purpose of increasing advertising CPM. At least, with an interstitial ads, the reader only needs to click once to get beyond it.

My final pet peeve is with news sites where the actual content of the article is completely below the fold. You can't even begin to scroll down to the actual article until the multiple instances of the Flash players finish loading and begin rendering their flashing ads.

P.S. - I wonder if it's called Flash because so many ads now flash using Flash? (That's a joke.)

Citizen Journalism: First hand experience

Today, I had a first hand experience with citizen journalism. I think of it as pro-am journalism where both a professional and amateur report the news.

This morning, when driving from Carlsbad to San Clemente, I was stuck in gridlock on I-5 ("the Five"), northbound, which was backed up for more than a dozen miles at the Las Pulgas exit of the Marine Corp base at Camp Pendleton. Since this 17 mile section of the Five passes through a military base, there are no public detours between the two towns that border on Camp Pendleton's north and south sides. But, fortunately for me, I still have a military sticker on my car which let me cut through Camp Pendleton to avoid the traffic.

After cutting through Camp Pendleton I was headed back onto the Five at Las Pulgas, via a service road, when I passed the wreck which caused the accident. I made a U-turn and parked next to the truck to snap these photos in the parking lot where the flatbed truck was parked.




After taking these photos, I stopped at a tea shop in San Clemente, a few minutes later, and posted one photo to Twitter. Immediately, a reporter from the North County Times saw my photo and tweeted me to ask if she could use it to accompany an article about the accident.

@JoeMoreno Do you mind if I use that photo on the NCT website? We have a story up, but no art.less than a minute ago via TweetDeckDorrine Mendoza
AssignmentDesk1

I told her that I has several photos which I sent to her.

@AssignmentDesk1 Sure. Feel free to use that accident photo. I have several other photos that I can email to you if you'd like.less than a minute ago via Twitter for iPhoneJoe Moreno™ 
JoeMoreno

She ended up using two of my photos in the article about the accident.


I was telling the tea shop owner about the accident and gridlock as I was tweeting with the reporter and sending her my photos. The shop owner casually mentioned that, earlier this morning, as he headed from his home in Carlsbad to his shop in San Clemente, he was passed by a white pickup truck driving the wrong way on the Five which kicked up rocks into his windshield. I was stunned! The tea shop owner drove right past the pickup truck just before it caused the four-vehicle pileup.