Thursday, April 28, 2011

Media companies haven’t exploited opportunities created by iPad and mobile technology

Poynter  Damon Kieslow: So far those (iPad) opportunities have gone largely unexploited as media companies try to figure out exactly what tablets are good for. As I noted last month, most of the U.S. newspaper apps to launch recently on the iPad are replica editions — basically PDFs of the printed product. While there may be a small audience for these replicas, this is a transitional model at best and will do nothing to build new audiences on tablets.
Likewise, many interactive newspaper apps are a lot like print products — but not necessarily in a good way. Apps from USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are well designed, but they still offer the same type of content as in print, with a similar look and feel.
Personalized news services like News.me and Trove are entirely new forms of news presentation, pushing the medium forward with a mix of aggregation, social media, curation and filtering. For better or worse, the vanguard of this effort consists of startups like Flipboard, Zite, News 360 and Taptu, not longstanding media companies.
So, just over a year into the age of the iPad, what can media do to compete? Clay Shirky has suggested that “nothing will work, but everything might.” That is a call to experiment,  fail and try again. Not every startup will succeed, but it only takes one Craigslist or Google to devastate an old industry (classifieds) or start a new one (search advertising).
The problem has been that media companies are not trying enough, quickly enough. It is not that media cannot innovate, it is that media organizations have not been structured to encourage it.
That is beginning to change, slowly. Look again at News.me and Trove. Neither is a finished product or a perfect one. But both were created by newspaper companies that put resources into research and development. News.me was created by The New York Times R&D lab and transitioned to Betaworks for development. Trove was built by the WaPo Labs team.
Tackable, a crowdsourced photojournalism app, is another example. An independent developer is building the app, but the San Jose Mercury News is incubating it. Tackable gets office space and some development assistance, and the Mercury News gets a version of the app built to its specifications.
And this week, the first round of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Challenge launched. In the next two years the project will fund fellowships for 15 developers in newsrooms in the U.S. and abroad to “harness open-Web innovation for journalism.” One of the first challenges is building HTML5 apps for Web and mobile platforms.
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media-lab/mobile-media/129372/media-companies-havent-exploited-opportunities-created-by-ipad-and-mobile-technology

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