Misc.

I recently participated (well, sort of — via a remote Skype presentation) in the University of South Carolina’s “Journalism, Sustainability, and Media Regeneration Conference.” Its organizer, Professor Augie Grant, sent a survey to everyone who attended that opened with a couple questions that I should not answer but cannot resist:

“Think about all of the possible forms of delivering news and information online. In general, what ‘top of the mind’ ideas do you think ‘online news’ will look like in 20 years?”

and

“Now think about the type of device and where people will be accessing news. How do you think these factors will affect the format(s) of online news in terms of what the user wants?”

Twenty years?! Now there’s an opportunity to make a fool of myself with predictions that have a slim-to-none chance of turning out to be correct. But what the hell, it’s fun to try. And when I’m 74, I can chuckle at my prognostications while relaxing in my solar-powered rocking chair as my digital assistant finds this old blog item, reads each prediction, and explains where I went wrong (or was right).

[Note to future self's information assistant: Find this and bring it to my attention 20 years from today.]

1. We won’t call it “online news,” but simply news. Even today, I think “online news” is an outdated term; I prefer “digital news” in order to encompass news consumption whether online on a laptop or untethered on smartphone, tablet, or other wireless device.

2. News — my own personal version of “the news” — will be everywhere I go, and available on any device that I may encounter. Laptop (will they still be around then?), personal tablet, phone/communicator/personal assistant: They’ll all know what I’ve read or viewed (including how far into a story or a video); what important news and events I don’t yet know about but should; and know my preferences from having tracked my every bit of info consumption for years and offering choices that are for the most part spot on. This same personal data profile will be available on any media device that I come across. My (electric) rental car’s media device will identify me (and know me intimately) by communicating with my phone, and its screen will show my relevant news: the map to my hotel and driving time; photograph of the sunset at home from my wife; the soccer score of this afternoon’s game that my grandson played in; the top news stories in the city I’ve arrived in; local weather forecast; the top news headlines from my home city, national and international headlines. When I start driving the car, the media system will switch to audio, and respond to my commands.

3. What we call “news” today will have a different meaning in 20 years. As alluded to above, it means everything from what my wife and I are having for dinner, to the next-door neighbor’s cat was killed by a coyote, to today’s movement of my investment portfolio, to the more traditional news items (i.e., what’s happening in the world, near and far). Yes, it will be a lot of information, but I will be able to choose layers to focus on (say, family “news” or “just sports”); or have my stream filtered to show some of everything but at a high interest score based on my info profile. It might tailor what I see based on my mood: “I’m tired; don’t give me anything too depressing or complex.” … Note that 20 years from now this “news” will not be tied to a single news brand, but rather some “news+information system” or “agent” (with a brand) will find and deliver all that’s relevant to me, from many media brands. (Perhaps I’ll pay a monthly fee for this service, which will divvy up my money to pay bits to the various content sources included in my news stream. For “premium” content within my stream, I’ll pay this entity to include it in my stream rather than deal directly with lots of content or information purveyors.) Some “news” will be from friends, neighbors, strangers who are not journalists, and will not partake in the money-splitting; but I’ll be able to “tip” or donate money if I wish to. Their news will flow seamlessly into my news stream alongside professional sources, but I’ll always know at a glance what kind of source I’m viewing.

4. In 20 years, I think we will have figured out how to identify quality and credibility among the thousands and thousands of news sources vying for some of my attention. If my friend recommends an article from an author or news source that I’ve never heard of, I’ll see quality and credibility scores for the article and the source, and measures of bias that this source might exhibit. It won’t be enough, as it is today, to read a hot story because dozens of my friends have; I’ll have some better indicators of who and what’s worth my media time, and how good (or bad) they are, to add to my friends’ recommendations.

5. Along those same lines, my news tools will fact-check every news story I read, highlighting mistruths, mistakes, bias, etc., and providing citation links to back up highlighted problem areas in the content. If a news story is analyzed as getting too low of a credibility score, my news assistant will recommend that I skip it. (Perhaps this will develop into an industry of its own, as an important piece of the 2034 media environment.)

6. If you think that there aren’t enough hours in the day, today, just wait 20 years! With exponentially more news and information, I’ll need a killer filtering system that identifies the best media content with little to no effort on my part. I’ll also have at my disposal information tools that will condense the news and information I need or want to consume. “Information assistant: Give me Boulder, national, and technology news headlines of the last 12 hours in 15 minutes, audio format” (the time I have on my drive to the office). “I have 30 minutes to read on this train trip. Condense my book to be read in 30 minutes, text format.” Algorithms will be sophisticated enough that an e-book that normally would be read in 4 hours will in 30 minutes give me a pretty good summary, and likewise select the most important pieces of news stories to fit into my desired, limited time. Much if not most content will be available in multiple formats, to suit my desire to read, listen, watch, or interact with a news story or other information.

7. What about platforms? This one is so difficult to predict, but even 20 years hence I can’t imagine a pocket-size device (today’s smartphone, evolved ) being able to do everything. My future handheld assistant can be my window to the news of the world and the neighborhood; it can be my ultimate communicate-with-anyone-in-any-format device; it can replace my expensive dedicated camera and video-cam; it can replace my wallet (ID, credit cards, cash, membership cards, medical history); and much, much more. But I think we’ll always want a larger screen, both for more pleasant and enjoyable media consumption (especially video and movies) and for getting work accomplished, as well as for reading books, catalogs, and documents. If there’s a popular device today that’s probably toast in 20 years, it’s the laptop computer. I think we’ll see such tremendous gains in tablets that they will replace laptops as most people’s primary work device. This MacBook Pro that I’m typing on today, in 20 years will probably be looked on like we woud a manual typewriter today. … So, two primary personal media devices. That’s my prediction, but seriously, who knows what other grand devices will emerge that we can’t live without.

8. Location, location, location. In 20 years, I expect that just about every physical object in our world will have data attached to it, in multiple layers of information type. Walk past a building: Your phone/personal assistant will know who’s in it (companies as well as people in your friends networks), what recent news and historical events are associated with it; etc. Walk down the street in a high-crime urban neighborhood and you’ll be able to view to physical locations of past murders, assaults, drug arrests. Come upon a statue while strolling a new city and view its story, including a short video documentary; leave a digital “I was here” message to add to the statue’s location data. Walk down the street, unsuspectingly, toward a crime scene, and you’ll be alerted to reroute, and receive what information is available about the incident, including photos and accounts from eyewitnesses.

9. I do still think that we will have, two decades from now, some major, important, well-respected, credible serious-news organizations. They will do the hard stuff — the costly investigative reporting; the constant monitoring of governments and corporations, exposing misdeeds and mistakes. I think that they will be public media entities, mostly, not commercial, because we will have gotten fed up with the mediocrity that news organizations supported by corporate interests gave us for so many years. From today’s vantage point, I see continued decline of “traditional” news media, which will force public media to step up their game. Wealthy technology companies, not with malice but simply by the nature of their businesses having disrupted news business models and not leaving alternative or new models sufficient to fund quality journalism, will steer their foundations to support public news organizations. At the local level, community foundations will have come to understand that low-quality local journalism has a negative impact on many facets of their communities, and they will fund local public media to a degree sufficient to have a strong local media watchdog. Of course, foundations won’t fund all this, and in 20 years public news organizations will have figured out how to sustain themselves with the help of foundations, but not be dependent on them.

10. Finally, I think that in 20 years many of the functions done by human journalists will be accomplished with automation. That’s a trend that’s been happening in most industries for many decades, so it’s a pretty safe prediction. Today, social-media content (e.g., the Twitter stream) often surfaces news events, which get noticed by humans and eventually spread to reach mainstream media. It’s not difficult to imagine an algorithm that automatically identifies significant news events that surface within the Twitter “firehose” (if Twitter is still around and/or relevant in 20 years) and publishes early “breaking-news” reports automatically. It probably will have enough built-in smarts to spot hoaxes. And to hark back to earlier mentions of personalization, this auto-spotted news from the social stream will be delivered to you the news consumer when it matches your interests or is happening in your neck of the woods. A “news algorithm” might monitor the huge network of live video cameras likely to be ubiquitous in cities 20 years hence, identifying and live-streaming news events that it spots (accidents, fires, crimes in progress, etc.). … And the human journalists? This prediction in no way presupposes that there will be fewer employed journalists. Rather, they will be freed from mundane tasks and be able to concentrate more of their time on producing “enterprise,” investigative, and feature reporting. And certainly there will be more journalists making a living covering niche topics that today go uncovered.

OK, enough fun — or is it enough making a fool of myself for even attempting to look 20 years ahead. Actually, looking back over my words above, I think some of this is possible in another five years.

Whatever. The future of media will be what it will be. I just hope to continue playing a small role in shaping it for the next 20 years.

I’m not the most organized person, but I do try. And thanks to some wonderful digital technologies that I’ve discovered, I’m much better at staying organized than in the past. So I do feel qualified to participate in this month’s Carnival of Journalism, where the challenge is:

What are your life hacks, workflows, tips, tools, apps, websites, skills, and techniques that allow you to work smarter and more effectively?

Here are just a few things that I find most valuable:

Omnifocus

While I prefer to do my work and store it in the cloud, Omnifocus is an exception. It’s a client app (Mac only) for organizing projects and your life, and it’s by far the best I’ve found. And I’ve tried LOTS of personal organizers, going all the way back to paper Franklin Planners (failed), to using a Handspring Visor (an old Palm Pilot clone), to Remember the Milk, and loads more that failed me — or more accurately, I failed them. But Omnifocus is great. It takes some time initially to get it set up with your projects and personal behavior patterns reflected, and you need to use it regularly to keep it up to date, but the effort is worth it. Omnifocus also syncs with its iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad apps, but both of those must be purchased separately from the $80 price of the Mac app. (While Omnifocus syncs to the cloud, you’re working on your Mac or iOS device, so I differentiate that from actually working in the cloud, as with something like Remember the Milk.)

Google Docs

This is obvious, but worth mentioning as a cloud-based way to create and store your work and notes. Rather than my old way of taking notes (say, during a phone interview) on TextEdit, I open up a new Google Docs text document and save it to a folder. I also do my writing on Google Docs (unless I’m away from Internet connectivity); I like the security of knowing that if my Macbook’s hard drive dies while I’m writing, my work won’t be lost. (Yes, that has happened to me in the past.)

ActiveInbox for Gmail

I love Gmail, and I’ve loved Gmail for many years. (I cannot believe some people still use Outlook! Yuck!!) What makes Gmail even better is adding on ActiveInbox, which helps you manage e-mail tasks and projects and overall makes managing a massive and active inbox much easier. It works with Gmail’s existing labels, and the learning curve is close to zero. It’s based on GTD (Getting Things Done) principles. I love it.

Rapportive

This is another Gmail add-on, and I can’t recommend this one highly enough. With Rapportive on top of Gmail, when you open up an e-mail, say from someone you don’t know, Rapportive looks up the sender on various social networks and displays that information (along with a photo of the person, usually) in the right column, so it’s simple to learn about the mysterious e-mail correspondent. Hover over any address in an e-mail and Rapportive will instantly reveal details on that person, which is great when an e-mail has multiple recipients and you want to find out more about them.

Scrible

Scrible is a browser bookmarklet that allows you to highlight any webpage and add comments to it. You can then save the highlighted version of the page to your personal Scrible.com library and tag the articles for grouping, or e-mail the highlighted copy of the article to someone else. This is a very new product, so it’s not perfect; I occasionally try to mark up or save an article and Scrible’s servers are super-slow or don’t respond. I wish that I could share my personal library of highlighted articles, or groups of tagged highlighted articles, with others, but that’s not possible (and probably would violate copyright law if it was). But I really like the interface of this bookmarklet. My wife insists that Diijo is the best of these types of save-stuff-and-mark-it-up solutions, but I prefer Scrible; it just seems faster that using Diijo. I’m hoping that Scrible will evolve to be even better, but it’s off to a great start.

USAA Mobile Deposit

If you don’t bank with USAA, perhaps your bank has a similar phone app. USAA’s iPhone app allows you to take photos of both sides of a check and deposit it instantly. Thankfully, electronic deposit, Paypal, et al are fast making paper checks go the way of printed newspapers. But just like newspapers, checks will be with us for a while, so it’s a great time-saver to be able to use my iPhone to deposit them.

Zite for iPad

I own an iPad (1), and it’s my favored device for keeping up with RSS feeds (i.e., personalized news). I’ve tried most of the slick RSS readers and personalized-news apps for the iPad, like Flipboard, News.me, Trove, Reeder, and others that I’ve now put out of my memory. But Zite stands out and is the one that I continue to use regularly. Highly recommended.

Queue up the “eBay Song” by Weird Al Yankovic. … An eBay oddity landed in my inbox today in the form of a Google Alert e-mail that I have set to watch for when my name turns up in articles, blogs, etc. Included was a link to this page on eBay where an online bookseller has two copies of my 1996 trade book, “Newspapers and New Media,” for sale with a Buy-It-Now price of $118.64.

The amusing thing to me (well, actually, it’s just sad) is that the small advance and piddling royalty checks I received over the years from the publisher for that thin (67-page) title made it, I think, the single project in my past with the lowest payout per hour of work.

Thanks, Google Alerts, for reminding me of an ancient bad career decision. … It’s amazing, isn’t it? The crap you can buy on eBay?

Some folks who attended my “Why now is the best time ever to go into journalism!” keynote talk at the National College Media Convention in Austin, Texas, on Friday asked how to get a copy of my presentation. A PDF version (big file!) is here.

I’m sure this will be mainstream across many professions before long, but for now it’s mostly limited to technology and media conferences. I’m talking about how speakers now get feedback from their audience as soon as they finish talking, via tweets from audience members posted immediately to Twitter. Overall, it’s a positive development that can benefit speakers — though something to get used to, and the speaker might take a few lumps.

Friday morning I gave a keynote talk on the third day of the National College Media Convention in Austin, Texas. It’s been a while since I gave a presentation solo to a fairly large audience, and so the audience tweeting was focused on what I was saying for close to an hour. (Being on a panel, your part is likely to only get a small number of tweeted comments.) As long as the attendees in my session used the conference hashtag (#ncmc09) and my Twitter name (@steveouting) or real name in their tweets, I could see the reaction from lots of people in the audience once my podium time was up.

There’s also a CoverItLive feed of Twitter posts during my talk on CoPress.org.

So while this is not the first time I’ve had a speaking engagement where audience members were tweeting, this was the first one where I got a really good feel for the new world of public speaking. It’s an interesting experience of getting feedback that wasn’t possible in the past. For example, I learned:

• What points people thought were most relevant (via multiple tweets of the same thought or quote).
• What things I said were misinterpreted or misunderstood. (That’s great information for next time; I know I need to do a better job explaining a particular slide or point.)
• What I screwed up. (A dollar figure I cited that apparently was wrong.) … Etc.

One interesting insight was when I got to a part of my talk where I discussed the need for Journalism schools to expand their reach to other disciplines, so that journalism students also learn entrepreneurial and business skills, and some computer science skills (or at least enough to understand how to talk with and work with MBAs and computer scientists). Some tweeters in the audience thought I was “bashing” journalism schools, and felt offended. Without those tweets, I never would have known that some people heard something different than I thought I said (which was that for this period in journalism’s history, business and technology skills are a necessary complement for a generation of journalists charged with reinventing the news business). I’ll phrase it differently next time.

And, of course, if you don’t have the oratory skills of President Obama (I definitely do not), you might hear a bit about that, too. … Seeing one person tweet that my delivery lacked enough voice inflection, I’ll go watch a few Obama speeches and work on that.

I think that as this audience behavior becomes even more common at conferences and lectures, it will help those speakers brave enough to look on Twitter for feedback to learn how to improve their delivery and message.

And, of course, it’s pretty cool for the audience members of a speech where one person is doing all the talking to be able to watch what others are tweeting. You get a sense of what points resonated with the audience; perhaps it’s something that your mind skipped over, or you interpreted differently. After the session, you can tap the collective minds of the rest of the audience to find the best stuff that was presented, and probably find additional insights beyond the speaker’s.

For speakers, get used to lots of people not looking at you but rather at their laptops or smart-phones. Lots of heads pointing down no longer means what it used to at a speech. It can mean that you’re presenting information that people find valuable enough to share via tweeting … or that everyone has noticed the ketchup stain on your tie. You’ll know after you’ve finished talking.

An alert listener of Colorado Public Radio heard my interview last week on the “Colorado Matters” program, and noted that I erred in citing ProPublica, the independent investigative reporting website, as “ProPublica.com.” Well, I can’t very well fix my recorded radio voice to the correct ProPublica.org, but I’ll at least note it here.

But ProPublica also gets a bit of blame. “.org” sites frequently get misquoted as “.com” sites, so it would make sense for the site to have acquired “ProPublica.com” and then redirected it to ProPublica.org. A domain search reveals that someone else owns ProPublica.com, and going to that URL just turns up a “not found” error.

If ProPublica.org gets the opportunity to buy the ProPublica.com domain, it should. Then little mistakes like mine won’t really matter.

But I’ll cite it correctly next time.

I have a new, complimentary subscription to Field & Stream magazine (print edition). Why is that? Since I don’t fish or hunt, or have any interest whatsoever in reading about either, publisher Bonnier is wasting money by granting me an unasked-for 1-year subscription.

I’m thinking this started with my paid subscriptions to a couple printed cycling and mountain biking magazines, which apparently generated an unasked-for complimentary subscription to Outside magazine. I was fine with that, since I enjoy Outside, though I won’t pay to renew when my 1-year free trial ends (assuming it does). So my guess is that as an Outside “subscriber,” it was assumed I must also be into fishing and hunting.

This must signal signs of desperation among magazine publishers. But receiving my “free gift” annoyed me, thinking about the wasted paper and downed trees represented by a print product I don’t want. At least when I get an unasked-for online subscription (which happens occasionally), I can easily unsubscribe with a click or two and no birds lose their homes.

Now I’m curious what magazine will turn up in my mailbox unannounced next. If mountain biking leads to assumption that I like the outdoors, and that leads to another assumption that I must enjoy fishing and hunting, then what’s coming next? Perhaps Soldier of Fortune?

Yeah, I’ve been playing hooky quite a bit lately. In the previous couple weeks I’ve mountain biked 4 days on Utah’s famed White Rim Trail, then succumbed to an invitation from a friend to drive to southwestern Colorado and ride some great trails near Cortez and Durango for 2 days. (Fellow mountain bikers: You have got to check out the Phil’s World trail system which is near the entrance to Mesa Verde National Park. Stellar!) It’s a “benefit” of being temporarily underemployed to take time off, but my legs are feeling tired.

While I was away, Colorado Public Radio current affairs program “Colorado Matters” aired a 13-minute interview with me by host Ryan Warner. Here’s the archived version if you care to listen to the discussion about the future of news in an era when the newspaper industry is falling apart.

Newspapers’ Digital Future

A reader of one of my recent Editor & Publisher Online columns takes me to task for using “digital” rather than “online” to describe what we used to call “new media.” He prefers “online” as more accurate.

Actually, I’ve shifted my word usage to “digital media” on purpose, and think I’m correct in doing so.

“New media” is on its way out, for obvious reasons. Publishing online really took off in the early to mid 1990s, and that term was appropriate perhaps through the ’90s. I’ll admit to using it into the 2000s but probably should have given up on the term a long time ago.

The trouble with “online media” is that it, to my mind, implies the state of your PC constantly connected to the Internet via an ethernet cable or wi-fi. But it doesn’t really work to describe mobile devices like phones or e-readers (e.g., Amazon’s Kindle), which increasingly are supplementing or even replacing the PC as Internet access devices and retrieve data from the Internet on-demand.

Can a mobile phone used for e-mail, instant messaging, web browsing and search, etc. really be called “online”? I don’t think so, unless I’m sitting with my iPhone and picking up a wi-fi signal. When I’m traveling on the highway and my phone only has access to the cell network, can you call that “online”?

So for now I’m sticking to “digital media,” with the belief that it’s a broad enough term to cover most everything that we now publish to (other than print and remaining analog TV and radio).

What do you think?

Take heart, newspaper aficionados and media curmudgeons. You’ll still have the comfort of the printed newspaper as you travel in space in the year 2259! (Well, that assumes you’ll be getting cryogenically frozen and are revived in a couple centuries.)

Credit my friend and colleague Christopher Ryan for spotting this look into the future. Chris was viewing old TV shows on Hulu.com and came across a 1995 episode of the cheesy sci-fi show Babylon 5. In this episode, “Divided Loyalties,” the writers envision newspaper reading onboard spaceships in the distant future.

Who would have guessed? Newsprint is still around, even in space!

Sorry I can’t embed the video here (Hulu.com doesn’t support that; grrrr), but click the image or the link above and watch just the first scene for the 1995 view of news consumption in the centuries ahead.

Oh, there’s advanced technology involved with Babylon 5′s edition of “Universe Today.” You get to tell the computer to personalize your paper with extra news about whatever you want, then it spits out your personalized paper copy.

But won’t the spaceship fill up with stacks of old papers? Of course not, silly. They recycle in the future. Insert your previous edition into the recycling slot and get your updated paper edition. As near as I can tell from this scene, you still have to pay for your newspaper, so I guess they solved that troubling free-web-content issue decades ago.

Ah, won’t the future be wonderful?!