don't look crazy.

The New York Times launched v2.0 of the TimesReader app today, and it's pretty but useless unless you plan on paying in the neighbourhood of $180 a year to have the website in an app, with better formatting.

This reminds me, as most things do, of advice my mother once gave me.  If you endure something intolerable for as long as possible, and then finally speak out and take action, no one understands that you have been heroically enduring the situation, and are only taking a stand now, out of necessity.

People just assume you've gone crazy.

Because the people haven't changed.  If people see you tolerating a situation wordlessly for years, and then suddenly railing against it, the only thing that has changed is you.  Seemingly out of nowhere, you've changed the rules.

People might not want to pay for content, but they will pay for formatting, delivery and convenience.  But your price has to take into account that the content is already considered free.  $180 a year for formatting and an app that runs on Adobe AIR doesn't feel all that reasonable, especially if it comes with no extra goodies beyond that.

I want to use the TimesReader app.  It looks great, and I would probably be more than happy to pay for it.  Just not at anywhere near the current price, when the total displaced revenue is from online ads I wouldn't have clicked, and the cost of developing the application.

pick a race you can win.

Steve Rubel makes a great point today at MicroPersuasion, which got me thinking about something.

I dream of running a campaign where the information is released free-for-all, with interested parties (whether they be print journalists, bloggers, or simply interested people) have access to the same information, at the same time.

I will not get to do this any time soon, because it would massacre the potential for coverage in many major traditional media outlets.  The most important things I can offer to journalists I've worked with are relevance, accuracy and access, but while these are essential, they lack the pure excitement that getting something first, or something exclusively, can generate.

This is a really bad call on the part of everyone involved.

Social media means information is faster than journalism.  When someone was shot on the subway system, I heard about it through Twitter, several minutes before there had been anything authoritative on television or online about it.  It's the same logic as an album leak - if information exists, it will be shared first through unofficial channels.

This happens, because journalists are, and should be, held to a higher standard than anyone else sharing information.  Being better at times means being slower.  If you're researching, fact-checking, and carefully crafting a balanced article that deals with all aspects of a problem, the value isn't in doing it first.

The value of good journalism is doing it BETTER than the layman.  Not sooner.  Insisting that first is genuinely important encourages the audience to forget that.

Newspapers, television, magazines and radio aren't fast enough to win on speed without hampering the flow of information, or sacrificing quality.  But they've proven the value of careful, skillful investigation and exploration an innumerable number of times.

There was a time when daily was fast enough to be the source of new.  That time has passed, and we should adapt.

journalism and dialogue.

If you haven't heard, the modern news media is having some tough times.  Not too long ago, the refrain from communication studies classrooms was that Journalism was Dead, because of the rise of infotainment, the propagation of stories from government PR, and inherent bias in the presentation of facts, rather than a bias in editorial mandate.

Now the issue is the massive decline in advertising dollars and print readership, while no one has figured out how to make enough money to support a real newsgathering operation via the online audience.

At some point in the not-too-distant future, every story, every narrative will become collaborative, whether or not it is authorized to be.  I have a feeling the influential media outlets, and the journalists, that exit that transition in the best shape, will be the ones who can strike a balance between publishing from a position of authority and collaborating as part of a community.

I regularly debate the validity of things like transparent sourcing, and the position of authority most journalists operate from, with a good friend of mine who happens to be a journalist.  This is one of the few things we don't seem to have much common ground on, and it's confusing.  I respect journalism and journalists, not just professionally, but because I believe the type of society I want to live in requires an informed populace, and the kind of check-and-balance that investigative reporting represents.

At the same time, I think journalism is like cryptography: while some people would argue that key elements should be left in the hands of professionals, nothing is truly tested unless every interested eye can take a look, and see if they can spot the holes in it.  By this I don't mean that articles should be a wiki - but I do think it's reasonable to think that links to source documents, or other takes on the issue, will eventually become standard in the same way that comments are quickly becoming standard.

I'm not going to entertain the idea that proper reporting doesn't have a role in the future of newsmedia, because frankly, opinion pieces are only a small part of what proper news entails.  But I will say that I think the days of leading the conversation without becoming part of it as it moves on, are coming to a close.  I don't think the column or article is going to be the defining element of a story.  I think it's going to be the story.

I imagine following a journalist in more or less real time, getting the elements of a story in blog posts, in tweets, in images, all of which later come together in a more definitive story - crafted by the professional, but informed by the comments, queries and input of those who've been watching as things have developed.

I'm not claiming that I know anything special about journalism, but I am making a statement that I think it's not just the responsibility of journalists to figure out how to save the newsmedia.  I think that actual change and evolution requires looking at what elements are essential to quality journalism, and what elements exist because of the limitations and boundaries of the old media, the old production cycle, and the old technology.

oversimplifying the internets.

The Internet isn't one place.

I was reading the Toronto Star this morning, and (despite my ability to find evidence of this to link to) they've decided to stop printing online comments in the editorial page.  The thing that frustrated me isn't deciding that print content will be held to a different standard than online comments (anything should be held to a higher standard than online comments), it's that apparently someone suggested to these people that you cannot expect anyone online to use a real name, or write with correct grammar.

The Internet isn't one place.  Each location can, and does, establish it's own rules of engagement, expectations, and limitations on what is deemed acceptable.  One of the major problems print media has faced is finding the middle ground between refusing to change to incorporate the online readership, and flat out pandering to them.  If you want to print online comments in the Letters column, go ahead.  But let people know that comments won't be printed unless they are written fairly reasonably, and the writer is identified by a believable name.  Or, heavily moderate the comments, sending the message that people are welcome to enter the discussion, providing they want to maintain a suitable level of discourse.

Stop pretending the entire Internet is the same.  Because, nearly always, that assumption comes along with an inherent infantilization or criminalization of all 'digital natives'.  People who interact with others online are neither uniformly stupid, nor uniformly rebellious.  If you want to incorporate yourself into the online community, and incorporate the online community into your product, you need to figure out who you actually want to be spending that time interacting with.

If the future is social networking, being able to attract the suitable kind of people to your enterprise is more important than you think.

the newspaper i want to read.

I was talking with a friend who is just finishing her education in journalism, and about to enter the workforce. In the midst of one of those conversations that are universal among my generation, the 'I don't know where my industry / career / aspirations will fit in the everchanging landscape'. I told her, and still think, that there will always be a market for trained investigative journalists, mostly because they can do a story justice in a way most bloggers often can't.

I do, however, think that the newspaper is more or less dead in the water, and the magazine (in terms of news, not niche interests) is in a similar, though less drastic, situation.

The newspaper I would operate, on a base level, like a blog network. Individual blogs, run by trained journalists, covering one specific beat. Stories could be reported in full, or as they develop, but each beat would have a distinct voice, and the overarching narrative that can be established by having the same person covering the same issues over time.

Mix this with a solid amount of professional oversight, and it could be curated into a standard daily paper, and more than that, into tailored subscription papers, online or in print, that would only include selected beats, or writers, or even tags. Obviously, this would be available online as it happened, because speed is the other major advantage that blogging has over traditional outlets.

Depressingly, the idea of a voice, or author narrative coming through for current newspapers is more likely to mean a columnist that completely ignores the concept of critical distance from the story (paging Rosie DiManno) than it is to give each beat a character.

This isn't a well defined concept. But I think the current approach taken by newspapers to maintain an online presence that mixes the failings of blogs, with incompleteness when compared to the print edition, is doomed.

If someone would print me a one section version of the Globe and Mail, written by only people I respect, and containing only stuff I care about, I'd be willing to subscribe just for convenience. This is, of course, related to my obsession with print on demand.