I can honestly say that this is one app that I won’t be purchasing. News Corp. has systematically bent the spine of journalism in a single direction, against the truth, over the last decades.
I honestly don’t care how many good people are working on this (unlike Joshua Benton), I hope it fails, and fails hard. Not because I want journalism to fail, but because Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. deserve to fail.
More links to interesting articles around the web. I’m categorizing these based on general topics, and starting with some personal productivity reads.
Productivity
• 21 Time Management Tips for Bloggers: There are some very wise words of advice in this list from blogger David Risley. And while his advice is aimed at bloggers, I’d say they apply to anyone who works in an office. Naturally, I haven’t been following all of these tips (Don’t check e-mail first thing in the morning, for instance), but I plan to try them out.
• Make Each Day Your Masterpiece: Trent Hamm writes a blog called The Simple Dollar, which focuses on managing personal finance. There’s a wealth of information in there about money matters, but this particular post is about former UCLA men’s basketball coach John Wooden, who died June 4, 2101. He was 99 years old. Hamm uses Wooden’s words to inspire us to “seize the day.”
Today is really the only day that matters. You can’t make your past self do anything. You can’t make your future self do anything, either. Your only freedom of choice is right now, and thus today is your one chance to paint your masterpiece.
• Don’t pull all nighters, says 37signals founder: Lauren Rabaino (awesome former CICM intern) recounts her personal experience as an overworked, underslept college student. I can attest to the drain that a lack of sleep can have on both physical health and mental acuity. And squeezing more hours out of the day doesn’t mean you’re more productive. Recently, I’ve been trying to make a point to get more sleep. Read the post and some of the reasons why sleep is important for productivity.
• Don’t Write That e-Book!: Georgina Laidlaw at WebWorkerDaily explains why it might not be the best thing to follow an online trend just because everyone else is doing it. Some good tips on developing your own path to success in the online world.
Journalist’s Resource is designed to promote knowledge-based reporting. The site provides access to scholarly reports and papers on a wide range of topics. Journalist’s Resource provides the user with a brief Overview of each study, Teaching Notes and links to other relevant material.
The site includes information about public policy, journalistic ethics, interviewing, style and ethics, and an instructor’s guide. Be sure to check out the section on math for journalists. That said, I’m curious as to why they didn’t create this site as a wiki instead of a WordPress site.
A paid app might offer an incremental revenue stream, but advertising is going to have to carry the water (again). The Craigslist iPad app (which costs 99 cents) has moved into the top spot among paid apps, so the desire to connect with local content – and a local marketplace – is apparent. The opportunity to create something of value, something people will use, without recreating the newspaper or TV news show experience on the platform will determine whether local media can seize this opportunity. Or fall behind and hope to play catch-up as we have done with the web for 15 years.
• iPad for Journalists: Not on the Wires (a blog by a group of multimedia reporters in the UK) posts a video blog with five iPad apps that show how the platform can be used by journalists. (via)
• Bad pageview practices: Marco Arment highlights a quote from Richard Dunlop-Walters about the sorry state of site design that cheats for pageviews. To wit:
Employing tricks like needless pagination, auto-refreshing (see Salon.com), misleading headlines, and the like is cheating. You didn’t earn those pageviews, you tricked people into giving them to you.
Be sure and read the rest of the quote, which contains some salty language. (via)
• Gannett plans to roll out hyperlocal sites: Gannett TV stations are going to partner with DataSphere to provide content to hyperlocal neighborhood news sites in 10 markets. With more newspapers trying to make the hyperlocal equation work, I’d expect more broadcasters to hop on the bandwagon as well.
Activism
• PayInterns.com: Anyone who knows me knows that I despise the practice of unpaid internships. PayInterns is a site set up by Matthew Zinman that seeks to end that practice and replace it with more equitable internships. From an e-mail he sent to me:
At first blush, one might assume that abolition would be counter-intuitive to fostering opportunity for students and employers. To the contrary, our Proposed Reforms take a sensible, phased approach to actualize societal and systemic change with an emphasis on stimulating opportunity, not stifling it.
General Tech Geekery
• Camtasia for Mac: Camtasia is a screencasting tool that has been around for quite a while for the PC. Now, it’s been ported for the Mac. Unlike most screen capture tools, Camtasia allows you to edit and add transitions to the screencast within the software. SnapzPro, for instance, will export the screencast as a .mov file, and you must edit it in another program like iMovie or Final Cut. There’s a free 30-day demo to try it out. I’m trying it for the next month. (Via WebWorkerDaily)
• Starbucks to offer free wi-fi, new portal: Starbucks, which prides itself on its hip brand, has always been a pain when it comes to wi-fi access. You had to pay for an AT&T subscription to access the wireless in store, and the few times I tried to use it, I had trouble accessing the Internet anyway. Now, they are going to be offering free wi-fi in stores, and also this:
Building on the Wi-Fi update, Schultz also revealed plans for a new online customer experience called the Starbucks Digital Network, in partnership with Yahoo!, which will debut later this fall. This online experience – available only in U.S. company operated Starbucks stores – will be unique in its content offerings, allowing customers free unrestricted access to various paid sites and services such as wsj.com, exclusive content and previews, free downloads, local community news and activities, on their laptops, tablets or smart phones.
While it’s nice to get some of that paid content for free, I don’t know exactly how this Starbucks Digital Network will be so “unique” as to distinguish itself from every other portal on the Internet. We’ll see. (via just about every tech web site on the Internet)
Online Trends
• Neighbors Online: The Pew Internet and American Life Project has a new study that shows more people are using the Internet to communicate within their communities. (via)
Face-to-face encounters and phone calls remain the most frequent methods of interaction with neighbors. At the same time, internet tools are gaining ground in community-oriented communications.
By the way, the Pew Research Center databank is a great place to get raw polling data, as they make most of their datasets available for download. I used this in a research methods seminar a few years ago. There is information to be gleaned from the data that isn’t presented in the formal polling results Pew publishes (like regression analysis).
A team of faculty and student researchers and developers from multiple departments at the university plan to have the Optimist ready for the iPad by the end of March. Optimist editors plan to employ the new platform to deliver a more converged form of media to the ACU community in addition to the print, online and iPhone app versions of the Optimist.
Sure enough, Dan Reimold reports at College Media Matters, the Optimist app is now available for download.
Here’s a video from ACU featuring faculty and student editors talking about the new app, and some footage of the app in action.
I downloaded the app over the weekend, as I was curious about what was included in this first student media effort on the Magical Unicorn Device.
Before I get into the details, let me give kudos to the students and faculty at ACU who worked so quickly to turn this app out. It works, and for what it does, it’s a perfectly serviceable app.
Version 1.0 of the ACU Optimist App features:
• Dynamic content selector to allow you to move between sections
• Access to over five years of story archives
• Photo montages
• Updated ACU Wildcat Sports scores
A screen capture from the Optimist iPad app page.
So far, my response to the app has been lukewarm. It looks and feels a lot like a basic port of the Optimist’s WordPress-powered web site. The stories are listed in descending chronological order. Clicking on a headline takes you to the story page, which looks a lot like a standard WordPress single post page.
The text on screen is readable. the full-color photos are gorgeous. Depending on your WiFi, the stories load quickly when you click on the headlines. If you swipe your finger from the right side of the screen toward the left (near the top of the screen), you can also move from one section screen to the next section screen.
At the right side of the screen is a “Contents” tab that slides out to reveal four sections: News, Sports, Arts & Culture, and Opinion. Notice anything missing from that list? A dedicated section for multimedia content. For instance, the store description promises “photo montages,” but, poking around the app, I wasn’t able to find any.
Compare that with the online Optimist web site, which does suffer from a little too much “nav bar creep” (The tendency to add more and more nav bar links to different parts of a site). But prominent in the lower nav bar are links to its multimedia content (podcasts and videos).
And despite the promise of “converged media,” much of the Optimist’s online text content still lacks hyperlinks. Over several days of testing the app, I was able to find one story on the iPad app home screen that had a hyperlink to another web site (to be fair, this isn’t the app’s fault – most of the current stories on the web site don’t have hyperlinks either).
I assume the archive access is primarily available through the search feature in the contents tab. It would be nice to have monthly archive listing available as an option. I typed “2007″ into the search engine and came up with nothing.
In terms of iPad capabilities, the one “bug” I found in the app was that it doesn’t rotate to landscape view when you turn the iPad on its side, unlike most of the media apps I’ve looked at recently. This is not an iPad specific feature, it’s also part of the iPhone/iPod Touch user interface.
As I said, having looked through the iPad Software Development Kit, I give high praise to the ACU students and faculty for producing an app for this new computing device.
But my overall impression is that the Optimist development team could have spent more time working on the presentation and iPad feature list and not so much on being first out of the gate.
As this is version 1.0, there is promise for much more innovation out of this effort, and I look forward to see what uses they can make of features like location-awareness.
I hope the development team will look at what other news outlets are doing with their apps – check out the Reuters News Pro app for an example of weaving multimedia content into the home page, for instance – and improve the Optimist app in future versions.
Mathias Dopfner, CEO of Axel Springer, a German publishing powerhouse, was interviewed about the Magical Unicorn Device (aka iPad) on “The Charlie Rose Show” last week.
Since “The Charlie Rose Show” apparently hasn’t figured out the concept of embedding videos on other sites, you’ll have to go to this link to watch the interview.
There’s been quite a bit of discussion among journobloggers and other publishing types about whether or not the iPad (and similar tablet devices) will “save” the media industry, but none quite so over-the-top as this:
I spent a couple of days with a family in Miami and on Saturday morning I went to the Apple store on Lincoln Road and played a little bit with the iPad and then bought one with my son. And I think this is really starting a new era.
And I think every publisher in the world should sit down once a day and pray to thank Steve Jobs that he is saving the publishing industry with that.
I think the iPad is really delivering what we were all waiting for. It’s a device that enables you to visualize content in a very emotional way. It is an easy-to-use device. The price is a mass market price.
(Emphasis added)
I’ll have some more iPad related thoughts later today. But for now, watch the video. (thanks to colleague James Tidwell for the heads-up)
Also, here are some other people who’ve been fixating on the Magical Unicorn Device:
Housekeeping note: I’ve changed the format of the blog back to an earlier template. Those of you who’ve been reading for a while will notice something familiar. While the Mimbo theme we were using was a pretty good magazine-style theme, there were some bugs, and until I find a magazine theme I like better, we’re reverting to a traditional blog-style theme.
Tonight, I get to find out what is “The Future of Journalism.” I’m excited! I’ll let you know what I find out soon. In the meantime, here are some curated links to tide you over:
More links to interesting articles around the web. I’m categorizing these based on general topics, and starting with some personal productivity reads.
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Mathias Dopfner, CEO of Axel Springer, a German publishing powerhouse, was interviewed about the Magical Unicorn Device (aka iPad) on “The Charlie Rose Show” last week.