1. South African Paper's Mobile Site Focuses on 'Nowness'

Knight News Challenge, May 24

It pains us to see news organizations devote so much of their limited resources to platform-specific apps — frequently at the expense of their mobile sites. Apps are costly to develop, tedious to update, and, for all their trouble, serve only a fraction of the market.

On top of that, too often, they're more flash than substance, merely repackaging regular Web content rather than catering to mobile users' unique needs. 

For all these reasons, it was a breath of fresh air to read about Grahamstown NOW,  a nuts-and-bolts newspaper mobile site focused on "nowness."

It's not fancy or shiny - on the surface it appears to be just another mobile site. But there's a lot of depth below that surface. What it lacks in glitz and glam, it makes up for in its ability to serve up a snapshot at any given point in time of what's just happened, currently happening, or about to happen in Grahamstown.

2. Tag-team journalism: A case study of the California Watch distribution model

California Watch, July 27

News organizations are getting that serving more than one platform at a time and collaborating with the folks formerly known as the audience are no longer choices.

What they're not getting quite as well is that they don't have to use all platforms at all times and that the same technologies they're using to work with the folks formerly known as the audience should be used to work with the folks formerly known as the competition.

Investigative reporting nonprofit California Watch is an exception, as the education package — involving almost 20 media partners — detailed in this case study makes plain.

If we had one word to describe our distribution model it would be this: flexible. We craft a new distribution strategy for each story we produce, depending on the topic and the intensity of local interest.

3. The kids are alright, part 2: What news organizations can do to attract, and keep, young consumers

Nieman Journalism Lab, Aug. 19

Observers and especially practitioners can get so absorbed in anticipating the future they overlook that the future is right down the street at the neighborhood school. I wrote as much in my very first blog post for grad school last fall.

Today's young people are your (or someone else's) future users. They're already exhibiting some of the habits and tastes you will have to satisfy. To the extent they're not, you can shape their habits and tastes.

This applies to the news industry as much as any. Christopher Sopher, a University of North Carolina senior and author of the Younger Thinking blog, offers some insight.

News organizations need to learn from soda and snack producers and systematically infiltrate schools across the country with their products. There’s strong evidence that news-based, experiential, and interactive course design [pdf] — as well as the use of news in classrooms and the presence of strong student-produced publications — can both increase the likelihood that students will continue to seek news regularly in the future.

4. How the shift to mobile is revolutionising online news design

TheMediaBriefing, Oct. 10

Most of today's news sites aren't going to win any beauty contests, we blogged in August. Of course, this goes more than skin deep. Inefficient and cluttered design interferes with the communication itself.

Fortunately, the constraints of small screens are forcing cleaner, smarter designs, Guardian information architect Martin Belam writes.

Designing for mobile first means getting down to the real atoms of delivering news. And services like Instapaper, or Readability are reminding us that news stories are there to be read without clutter. By concentrating on the pure reading experience, and ditching the bells and whistles that make up so much online furniture, they encourage deeper and more engaged reading.

Image by ilco.

There's an app for that. And that. And that. But should there be? Or will there be? Platform-specific mobile applications might seem like the next big thing, but there are indications that they could be a passing fad, like Flash splash pages.

That's the comparison offered in a MobileBeat article this week, one of a few recent readings that make a case against native apps and in favor of standardized solutions like HTML5. The two other pieces, from mobile notification and purchase vendor Urban Airship and tutorial site Nettuts+, respectively, address developers' and businesses' mutual interest in creating consistent user experiences, which native apps complicate, and cover ways HTML5 can already be used in app development.

Like Flash splash pages, Peter Yared writes at Mobile Beat, native apps are expensive to develop and cumbersome to update. And, for all the resources they require, each serves only a fraction of the market.

On top of that, Yared goes on, apps easily get lost in app stores (especially on Android), forcing publishers to hawk them on their sites anyway. In the case of iOS, it's worth adding, apps are subject to a sometimes lengthy approval process that enforces restrictions on publishers' content and how they monetize it.

In part because publishers are going to be developing websites and mobile websites with HTML5 anyway, HTML5 apps are an attractive alternative. This synergy, the comparatively greater pool of HTML developers versus platform-specific programmers, the removal of any app store restrictions, and the ability to serve all platforms with a single app, would expectedly reduce the cost and hassle of building and maintaining apps.

HTML5 apps can't, at least not easily, achieve quite all of the functionality that native apps can — like accessing devices' cameras and local files systems. And this is something one would expect mobile companies to try to maintain through the design of their software and hardware. Still, the Nettuts+ article notes, HTML5 can accomplish most if not all of what the average publishers' requires.

At this point, there are merits to both approaches, but, publishers, especially smaller ones, should carefully weigh what they are gaining and what they are giving up by packaging content in a native app versus an HTML5 app — or even just incorporating it into a robust mobile website.

Storytelling is changing, so says the headline in a Journalistics post by Bethany Bengtson. Yes, of course she’s right, but I like her point. Some journalists have spent too much time lamenting new forms of publishing technology, like the web, blogging and social media, but storytelling will continue to evolve at a blistering pace. Get used to it, my friends.

Oh, and Bethany advises you also embrace shorter form content, keeping those blog posts under 500 words. Man, I hope she doesn’t take offense to this long post or this one.

Speaking of change, Jim Brady is no longer at TBD. We’ve followed TBD from the beginning, and you could count us as fans of their work. TBD Publisher Robert Allbritton said he and Brady had some “stylistic differences,” and it would seem Allbritton wants to focus more on original content. Under Brady, TBD was/is all about aggregation and technology.

While I doubt the talented staff there will lose sight of what’s over the horizon, the article surfaced a few questions for me. 1. Can news orgs afford to focus on just one of these – content, aggregation or technology? 2. If newsroom leaders must focus on more than one, how do they balance the attention each important aspect receives?

What are your thoughts?

Image by statianzo.

It's remarkable how much newspapers look like their parents. And grandparents. And great grandparents. With their medium in its second generation, a similar thing is happening now with news Web pages.

Why this is, and what it means for publishing's next iteration, is the thesis of a short, stimulating piece published this week on TheMediaBriefing.

Products of their times

Newspapers and news Web pages look the way they do, Guardian information architect Martin Belam writes, because of the technological envrionments in which they were created.

In the days of physical type, "interchangeable blocks of text with common widths" were a good way to accommodate late-breaking revisions. In the early days of the Web, "chunks of articles of broadly similar length" served a similar function on larger-monitor, consumption-oriented desktop computers.

Well, we're in the early days of mobile and tablets now. And it's getting later by the second. To paraphrase Mel Brooks' "Spaceballs," then will be now soon.

Tiny screens, many models

In "How the shift to mobile is revolutionising online news design," Belam previews what then will look like. Once again, form will follow function. The influential factors this time will be mobile screens' small size and the diversity of device types.

Design implications

There simply isn't room for 15 related story links, a most read panel, and 100 ways to share an article on the screen of a smartphone or small tablet - not to mention advertising. This forces a concentration on what the user is most likely to want to do next after consuming a story. ... It also means thinking about what are the real interactions you are hoping to encourage from the reader - to share the story, to comment on the story, or to dive deeper into a specific topic?

Development implications

In order to serve a wide range of devices, with differing screensizes and aspect ratios, rather than starting from scratch with a unique app and codebase each time, publishers will most likely ultimately have to develop "one-size-adapts-to-all" systems, relying on open standards like HTML5 and CSS3 to deliver content.

For newspapers and other legacy media organizations this is the best possible news. It's a back to basics approach that rewards their core values of editorial efficiency, consistency and quality.

You're working in journalism in one of the most scary but exciting times in its history, what are you going to do now? You're… going to Disney World? If you can afford it, maybe you should. Why? Because, like Disney, you're in the business of creating experiences. At least you should be.

That's the gist of an essay, "The Third Way to Media Success," published this week by Miller-McCune Research. Chronicling work by Northwestern University journalism researchers, the piece challenges publishers to find a middle ground between spoonfeeding audiences what they think is good for them and blindly following analytics.

Drawing on examples from the Food Network, The Arizona Republic and Popular Science, among others, it proposes a "'third way' that couples creative expertise with deep knowledge of audience experiences to build long-term reader and viewer loyalty."

Rather than framing their work according to terms used by journalists like "news" and "features," the essay offers, content creators should frame their work according to terms used by their customers, like "makes me smarter," "feels good," "kills time," and "talk and share." In other words, they should seek to create experiences their audience enjoys.

 A source in the article, whose firm publishes a Web portal for health care professionals, put it even more succinctly.

"Real success for any community-based site is getting people to come back on their own,” said Mike Alic, Advanstar’s vice president of strategic planning. “To do that, you need to be part of the narrative of their life.”

Another piece out this week, Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow Joy Mayer's interview with California Watch public engagement manager Ashley Alvarado, struck a similar theme. Following a discussion of what engagement means and some of Alvarado's duties and projects, Mayer concluded:

We learn early on as journalists that people love pets and babies. Ashley also knows that they love to see themselves in the news, and for California Watch, that means covering what they’re invested in and have a personal stake in. They’ll come back over and over for that.

We recommend giving both pieces a read. Each is a "makes me smarter" experience.

Open your eyes. Open your eyes. I said... OK, somehow that worked. Enter what you thought about in the box on this page.

Now look up at the dog. Now back at… Kidding, kidding. I'll leave Old Spice parodies to Elmo.

I'll guess that some of you thought of two people having a conversation. You know, the old-fashioned face-to-face kind. Others probably thought of the new kind of conversation taking place on social networks. Many, however, likely thought of something with more pizazz. Maybe a Flash presentation with moving graphics, video, sound and 3D-like effects. Certainly this is the right answer. Certainly this is more interactive than a simple chat or — is it, is it OK to say this, New York Times? — tweet.

It might be. It might not be. I'll make the case, though, that this humble blog post is more interactive than many more sophisticated presentations.

Interactivity has become such a buzzword that many otherwise thoughtful people don't fully think about what it means. They confuse bells and whistles for interactivity. Bells and whistles can contribute toward engagement — a topic for another post — but don't in and of themselves contribute toward interactivity.

More than any other two elements, interactivity is about multilateral feedback and choice. This blog post allows for ongoing human-to-human feedback — you can answer the poll or write a comment, I can respond to it in the comments or with a new post, and you can respond to my response by writing another comment or answering another poll — and virtually infinite choice — each of us can write pretty much anything we want.  

The average Flash presentation allows for sporadic human-to-computer feedback — you hover over a button, it changes color; you click on it, up comes new text and graphics for you to click on or hover over — and limited choice — your options and Flash's responses have all been pre-determined by the developer.

Am I saying that text polls and comments are better than Flash presentations? No. What I'm saying is 1) Don't overlook opportunities for simple interactivity. And 2) Don't assume something's highly interactive just because it's highly involved.

Always think in terms of value-added. How is presenting this this way adding value for users? How is users accessing it this way adding value for you?

Creative Commons photo by Flickr user SMN

McPaper has never been a big part of my media diet. In print and online, even when traveling, I'm more of a Gray Lady type of guy. That said, USA Today arguably had a bigger influence on the industry I entered six years ago and my earliest impressions of it than any other single publication.

Founded the year I was born, USA Today pioneered the color photos, infographics, branded sections and quick-read news items that had spread to virtually every newspaper — even The Gray Lady — by the time I graduated from journalism school 22 years later. On a personal level, USA Today, which followed my twin brother and his kindergarten classmates for 13 years for its series on America's high school class of 2000, gave me my first inside look at the journalistic process.

How influential will The Nation's Newspaper be over the next quarter century, a span that will cover the prime of my journalism career, and, of greater concern to all of you, settle many — but probably not all — of the questions being asked now about the future of the industry? That remains to be seen. But the chances it will at least have a seat at the table were boosted last week when it announced, along with 130 layoffs, a major restructuring, effective immediately, from a print first to a digital first news organization.

Digital First. From the Christian Science Monitor's ending its weekday print edition, to, more recently, Allbritton Communications' new TBD local news website and the Journal Register Company's Ben Franklin Project and ideaLab, it's a term that's come up a lot lately. It's a concept legacy media organizations — admirably led by those listed above — have only recently started embracing in earnest. Yet, it's already a buzzword. Like "fair and balanced." Like "breaking news." Like, a subject for a future post, "interactive." No matter how many times you say it, merely calling it such doesn't make it such.

A way of operating, working and thinking

So, before we get too far into this, what, precisely, does it mean to be "digital first"?

I'll break the old journalists' rule and ask as much as I answer here. That itself — both breaking rules and asking questions — I'd proffer, is a big part of digital first. At the most basic level, digital first is this:

• It's a business model. This is the money part. Not surprisingly, it's the part that gets the most attention.

  A digital first business model recognizes that print and broadcast advertising revenue won't support news gathering over the long term. In pursuit of sustainability, it might do some radical things, like forgo short-term revenue opportunities, more closely coordinate editorial and business operations and charge consumers for online content. Like it or not, believe it or not, each is likely to be at least a small part of the new reality.

• It's a workflow. This gets its share of attention, but mostly in spaces like ours, where, you know, audiences appreciate that journalism doesn't just materialize and that those who create it are human beings with hearts, minds and, yes, even souls.

  A digital first workflow recognizes that the process is becoming the product. It leverages new methods for finding, assembling and sharing stories, methods that sometimes can perform all three functions at once.

• It's a mindset. This gets the least amount of attention. And that's a shame. While the other two components are resource-dependent, everyone possesses the necessary equipment to start putting this one into action right away.

  A digital first mindset recognizes that with the static Web, social Web and mobile Web all coming of age during the lives of this fall's college freshmen, change is the only constant. What digital encompasses and therefore what must come first can change at a moment's notice. This means being proactive not reactive. It means not being afraid of problems and not getting too attached to solutions.

For more about USA Today's transition, we recommend checking out the newspaper's internal slide presentation and Ken Doctor's blog post for an overview, then heading to the Gannett Blog and BNET's Catharine P. Taylor's column for some criticism.

For more about digital first in general, this June piece from the Strange Attractor blog, Jeff Jarvis' January interview with Journal Register Company CEO John Paton and TBD's Steve Buttry's series of mobile first posts are all good reads.

What do you think of USA Today's restructuring? What does digital first mean to you?

Modified Creative Commons photo by Flickr user clevercupcakes.

Mama might have said "Don't play with your food." But she never said anything about playing with your news.

No, we're not talking about those newspaper sailor hats, though we're fans of those (fans enough to don them in a picture like that poor cow over there if this post gets at least 100 retweets). We're talking about online games like FarmVille, but, you know, less annoying.

Last week Norwegian blog The Refinement Club outlined its concept for The Newsgame, which rewards users with points and prizes for reading meatier* articles. (*We didn't set out to write a cow pun here, but we aren't gonna fight it.) There are also badges. What's a game these days without some stinkin' badges?

To make it more fun, you can earn different badges e.g Expert on different topics (like The Middle East, The Financial Crisis, Hollywood Gossip etc). In addition you can reach different levels and work for a spot on the Highscore list. All of this is of course shareable on Facebook, Twitter, your blog whatever, so you can brag about your intellectuality or current events addiction.

The authors go on to explain how their hypothetical game could serve as a Last.fm for news. Check it out. (Thanks to Smashing Magazine for flagging this intriguing idea.)

There are plenty of online news games already out there. Mark Luckie did a nice roundup a couple years ago on ones less social than The Newsgame. (Is there anything this guy hasn't done a nice roundup on? Seriously. Give the rest of us a chance here. Maybe that can be a game: Mark Luckie sits out a turn.) As smart phone apps proliferate, we're sure to see more news games, and location-aware, multiplayer ones at that.

All this got us thinking. What if some of our favorite childhood games were given a news twist?

• Connect Four — You're a legacy media mogul (black checkers), your opponent, the trends converging to sink your industry (red checkers). Can you adapt before losses pile too high?

• The Oregon (or insert your state here) Campaign Trail — The journey is long and arduous. With political campaigns starting earlier and more sources covering them than ever, can you and the rest of your news consuming party make it through the entire election cycle without drowning in the river of information or succumbing to mental exhaustion?

• Candyland — Can you reach or pass the final article before your competitors? Don't let sugar-coated infotainement masquearding as news slow you down!

• Shoots and Latters — Thanks to some poor copy editing, instead of the familar slides and steps, the classic board game is populated by plants and a host of seemingly random objects that happen to be the second of two things mentioned in a preceeding sentence. (That confused panda from Lynne Truss's celebrated punctuation book is there, too, pistol in paw. So, be careful!) Help the shrinking copy desk keep pace with the accelerating news cycle and get things back to the way they should be. Catch an error and move up the board. Miss one and fall back down it.

Share your own news game ideas — silly or serious — or alert us to cool existing games in the comments.

Creative Commons mashup photos by Flickr users law_keven and quinn.anya.