Introduction
As disruptive as Web sites have been to the traditional publishing and broadcasting model, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
The digital landscape is awash in change. Before you learn the basic skills that will allow you to participate in the digital revolution, it’s important for you to look at the lay of the land through a broad lens. New and evolving technology and gadgets have changed—and will continue to change—the markets that news operations are aiming to serve.
I will start with information about some tools you should be using and then discuss tools you should understand that others are using. Not everyone wants to watch movies on their cell phones, but there are some very simple tools and practices you should adopt as you become digitally literate.
Tools you should be using
Vanity searching: If you’re in a position to hire others, you have almost certainly added Google and Yahoo! to the screening process. Conducting a Web search of a prospective job candidate is a common step in the early sorting process and the results can be revealing. A 2006 survey conducted by CareerBuilder found that, of hiring managers who used Web searches to research job candidates, 51 percent have eliminated a candidate based on what they found. If they searched a social networking site like MySpace or Facebook, the results were more ominous: 63 percent did not hire the person based on what they found.1
What does this mean for you? Before you apply for a new job, do some vanity searching in both Google and Yahoo! Make sure there aren’t any compromising photos or inappropriate material. And if you’re a recent college grad, better check MySpace and Facebook, too. Just because you’ve never posted a picture of some wild times at a party doesn’t mean that no one else has. (If you find something, hopefully you can contact the “friend” who posted it and ask that it be removed.)
Flash drives and memory cards: Remember floppy disks? You probably have a stack of them at home or work, yet you never use them anymore. That’s because they hold such a small amount of data—1.4MB—that they’re just not practical. Think about it this way: A floppy disk could hold one, maybe two, digital photos.
Today’s digital landscape relies on small devices with huge amounts of storage. USB flash drives (for text) and memory cards like compact flash (CF) or secure digital (SD) (for digital photos or added game memory) can store hundreds or thousands of megabytes.
A 256MB flash drive; 256MB and 512MB Compact Flash (CF) cards.
And, like most technology, the prices on these devices have dropped precipitously since they hit the mainstream. A 1GB flash drive cost as much as $100 in 2004. In 2006, the same drive cost as little as $19. As a result, as many as 150 million flash drives were expected to be sold in 2006.
What does this mean for you? If you work with text, you can feasibly back up all your documents on a flash drive every time you log off your computer. It’s quick and easy and, as the saying goes, there are two kinds of computer users: Those who back up their data, and those who will.
Another useful application for flash drives is the transfer of large files. If you have photos or a honkin’ PDF that you want to send to someone in the newsroom, give the e-mail server a rest and copy it to a flash drive. The recipient can download it in a few seconds and your IT department will thank you for not clogging the server with several MBs of an attachment.
Flash drives have a bright future, too. In September 2006, the USB Flash Drive Alliance announced it will endorse a new generation of “smart” drives that will allow users to run active programs from flash drives. So in addition to document and image storage, the new flash drives will have your Web browser with all your bookmarks, your instant messaging program with all your buddies, your games and more, all encrypted to keep it safe. So wherever you are in the world, you could use any computer and it would be just like using the one at your home or office.
Mobile 2.0
Now that you understand a little more about Web 2.0—and you’re reading about Journalism 2.0—it’s time to introduce Mobile 2.0.
The next generation of wireless connectivity to mobile phones will allow regular cell phones, smart phones, BlackBerries and other devices to connect to the Internet via a high-speed network. Data will transfer as much as 10 times faster, according to some reports, which will make video, music, games and e-mail convenient to anyone, anywhere.
In effect, this is like going from a dial-up Internet connection to a high-speed hookup like the one you have at work.
Even before the third generation (commonly referred to as 3G) saturates the market, mobile delivery is a great opportunity for local publishers and broadcasters. Calendar listings, sports scores, news and weather updates are all within the regular operation of most local news publishing operations. Delivering them to mobile phones and other portable devices is the next logical step.
Look at the market: There are 200 million mobile phone users in the U.S. and 70 percent are Web-enabled; 35 percent of those who have the Web option are “regular” users.
- The Weather Channel has 4.8 million paying subscribers a month for its mobile service.
- ABC/Disney has 2 million subscribers at $15 a month delivering ring tones, voice tones, wallpapers and video clips.
You should be aware that dozens of companies are working hard to make what is happening now obsolete, so to preview the promise of any of these technologies would be like predicting the future. Some of these new technologies will gain critical mass and change the world of communications, but, if I knew which ones, I would be a venture capitalist instead of a journalist.
What does this mean for you? The push for immediacy will continue as news operations master breaking news on a Web site and move to present breaking news on mobile devices. It also means a broadening of the scope of information that will be considered worthy of an immediate update, meaning all types of information and news (sports, business, entertainment) will be part of the mobile equation.
iPod: The slim, sleek, 800-pound gorilla
The Apple iPod family.
One gadget that has already changed the media landscape is the Apple iPod. By describing the capabilities and uses of the iPod here, I mean to include any of the MP3 players on the market with video capability. No other device has changed the media landscape like Apple’s player and iTunes stores.
As of November 2006, Apple had sold nearly 60 million iPods in the five-year life of the gadget, with 36 million sales in the past 12 months. According to Piper Jaffray & Co. research released in October 2006, the iPod owns 79 percent of the market share for digital media players.
And talk about a youth market. Other Piper Jaffray research on teenagers found that 72 percent own an MP3 player and 79 percent of those specifically own an iPod. Almost half of the 1,000 students surveyed expect to buy a new media player within a year, and 76 percent of those prefer the iPod.
Some mainstream media companies are responding to this growing market. In September 2006, ABC News began creating a daily 15-minute newscast, separate from “ABC World News,” frequently using the same anchor, Charles Gibson. The “World News Webcast” is available through the Web site at 3 p.m. ET and ready to download on iTunes about an hour later. There were more than 5 million downloads in both September and October, 2006.
Newspapers such as the Roanoke Times in Virginia and the Naples Daily News in Florida began “vodcasting” in 2006. Each paper has built a studio for recording and producing video segments and each is making those shows available for download to an iPod or viewable on the Web site.
National Public Radio, meanwhile, serves more than 6 million downloads of its podcasts each month.
What does this mean for you? Every news organization is likely to try adding video to its mix very soon (if it hasn’t already). If you can be an early adopter and find a way to incorporate video into your beat or your specialty, you will have a leg up on the competition.
‘Other’ wireless
Some people actually still connect to the wireless Internet with a laptop computer. OK, that’s being too flip, since laptops are still the primary vehicle for people to use with the Internet, but when you see what’s happening with iPods and cell phones, it’s easy to forget.
Hitting a coffee shop with your laptop and paying a few bucks to connect to the Internet is one of the most popular ways to work wirelessly these days. But that business model doesn’t look promising. Independent coffee shops, restaurants, car dealers, rock-climbing gyms and all sorts of other small businesses now offer free Wi-Fi access, too. And the field is only getting more crowded.
- Many cities are working on municipal Wi-Fi systems to bring free wireless Internet access to a concentrated area like a downtown.
- Special cards provided by the major cell phone companies insert into most laptops and allow wireless connection to the Internet from anywhere there’s cell phone coverage. Users pay for the card—usually less than $100—then pay a monthly service fee for unlimited connectivity. A new service, called EV-DO, offers broadband-like speeds.
- A company called Clearwire, founded by Craig McCaw, who built one of the first cell phone companies, is launching in several U.S. cities. It offers standard wireless service or a special modem-like device that can be plugged into a laptop or desktop computer for more reliable service at a higher speed. The idea is that you could pay for one service that would go with you anywhere, so Clearwire would be your provider at home, at the local coffee shop, or wherever. You would use this external modem to connect at home or take it into coffee shop and use it instead of paying six bucks for a T-Mobile hook-up. It’s like having your home Internet connection anywhere.
What does this mean for you? The online audience served by breaking-news updates throughout the day will continue to grow. Thought of as the “at-work” audience for much of the digital age, potential readers of news updates will grow as wireless Internet service becomes free and ubiquitous. Combined with Mobile 2.0 gadgets and services and the continued mainstream adoption of downloaded material on iPods, the opportunities for news companies to reach customers digitally will continue to explode.
Get your “mojo” on: The increasing adoption of mobile communication technology not only changes the way audiences receive the news, but also opens up new ways to report it. Mobile journalists—or “mojos”—are becoming more common at TV news stations and even popping up at newspapers. Also known as backpack journalists, these multidimensional dynamos can carry an assortment of tools into the field to report the news in a fully multimedia manner. A laptop with wireless Internet connection, a video camera (that also shoots still photos) and an audio recorder are the basic pieces of equipment that allow journalists to produce news stories or blog posts, photos, video, or audio for a story.
Yahoo!‘s Kevin Sites is the best-known backpack journalist working today. Sites traveled to war-torn countries around the world to tell the stories of those most affected by calamity, and his regular feature, In The Hot Zone, on Yahoo! News claimed 2 million readers a week in 2006.
The News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla., meanwhile, dispatched several “mojos” into the field every day to report hyperlocal news close to home. These new era reporters have no desks and rarely a specific assignment outside of a geographical area to visit. They drive around their area and perform a modern version of that “old shoe leather reporting.” They also do marketing, handing out fliers to educate people about the news organization’s online services.
Frank Ahrens of The Washington Post profiled the News-Press mojos in December 2006 (and shot this photo of Kevin Myron in his car). “Their guiding principle: A constantly updated stream of intensely local, fresh Web content—regardless of its traditional news value—is key to building online and newspaper readership.”
Mojos are still an experiment, but if nothing else, they show how flexible—and mobile—journalists in the future can be when it comes to covering and reporting news.
Assignment:
- Talk to others about their toys: Ask how they use their cell phones, their iPods, and their wireless Internet. Ask them if they know people who use these technologies in interesting ways. To understand this new world, you should be able to converse in it.
- See what you can do: Have you tried to get news on your mobile phone? Have you downloaded a podcast to your computer or MP3 player? Try it.
1. CareerBuilder.com Industry Trends, 2006 Surveys: “One in four hiring managers have used Internet search engines to screen job candidates,” Oct. 26, 2006. http://www.careerbuilder.com/Share/AboutUs/IndustryTrends.aspx?archiveyear=2006