Tag: new media

Seeking Web design advice

Later this year I’m going to take on a significant Web-design project for a nonprofit organization. I’m not promising anything spectacular — just something that will be reasonably well-organized and up-to-date.

For my own modest sites (like this), I use SeaMonkey, a free, open-source descendant of the soon-to-be-late Netscape. I like the price, obviously, and the results are fine for my limited purposes. There are two things about it that I don’t like, though:

  1. When I make revisions, the underlying HTML code doesn’t clean itself up. To the contrary, it gets gloppier, to the point where sometimes I have to look at the source code and fix things by hand. I don’t want to do this, and I’m not good at it. It would be a major pain with a larger site.
  2. SeaMonkey is bare-bones, and provides no help in the way of templates or automated features to improve the appearance or performance of the site.

I briefly considered Apple’s iWeb before concluding that it was too limited even for me. I gave the open-source KompoZer a whirl and decided it was buggier than SeaMonkey (and less well supported).

Next up: RapidWeaver, Freeway Express and, of course, the big one, Adobe’s Dreamweaver, which strikes me as way more than I need, but which would certainly amount to a comprehensive solution.

So if there are any residents of Media Nation with good advice for an OS X Web-design program, I’d love to hear from you.

Cross-ownership and new media

Ten years from now — maybe a little sooner, maybe a little later — we’ll receive what we currently refer to as “television” through a thick Internet cable. As with today’s Internet, we will theoretically have an infinite number of choices. Rupert Murdoch (and, yes, I am convinced the man is going to live forever) may own nine of the 10 most-viewed video sites. But anyone will be free to start his or her own video operation, whether it’s the major metropolitan news site in your region (we may still be calling them “newspapers,” but strictly for nostalgia purposes) or the sort of community-minded folks who today volunteer at local-access cable television outlets.

As long as we can preserve net neutrality, such a mediascape is almost certain to come into being. And, at that point, there will no longer be a rationale for regulating the media. For some 80 years now, the FCC has regulated the content and ownership of over-the-air television and radio stations because of a very simple principle of physics: there is only so much broadcast spectrum available, and therefore it makes some sense to make sure that spectrum is used in the public interest.

Since the Reagan years, though, the FCC, with an occasional assist from Congress, has been moving away from its regulatory mission. The Fairness Doctrine and the equal-time provisions no longer exist, and corporations are allowed to own many more properties, both locally and nationally. Most famously, this led to the situation in Minot, N.D., a few years ago, when a train accident led to a deadly outbreak of poisonous gas — and there was no one at the local Clear Channel station to get the word out. (I should note that the story is at least partly apocryphal.)

Last week FCC chairman Kevin Martin led an effort to loosen ownership rules still further, allowing one company to own both a newspaper and a television station in the same city, an arrangement known in the trade as “cross-ownership.” The reaction to this has been remarkably low-key. Maybe it’s because Martin’s proposal is cautious and complicated: it would only apply to the 20 largest cities in the country, and it would pertain only to one of the smaller TV stations in a given market. Maybe it’s because he simultaneously proposed new limits on cable companies. Or maybe it’s because the news business is in such a diminished state that critics are accepting of, or at least apathetic toward, what they once would have railed against. I might fall into this category; and I find myself half-agreeing with Martin that allowing television and newspaper operations to combine might result in more and better journalism.

To be sure, some are vehemently opposed to this. Media-reform advocate Robert McChesney’s group, Free Press, is unleashing a campaign to overturn the loosening of the cross-ownership ban. A group of journalism-school deans, represented locally by Alex Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard’s Kennedy School, wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times arguing that “we do not believe that the market can be absolutely trusted to provide the local news gathering that the American system needs to function at its best.”

New-media cheerleader Jeff Jarvis wrote a post for his Buzz Machine blog claiming that the j-school folks just don’t get it. Now, I agree with Jarvis in part. I don’t like either Martin’s or the deans’ suggestion that the news content of broadcast operations should somehow be monitored and regulated. I do not lament the demise of the Fairness Doctrine or of equal time, and would prefer that the FCC limit itself to breaking up monopoly ownership. By ensuring local, diverse ownership, you don’t need to regulate content.

But Jarvis bases his argument on the belief that local television news is essentially worthless, which simply isn’t true. Yes, it could be infinitely better. But, certainly on breaking news, local newscasts keep newspapers on their toes. Let a media company that already owns a newspaper in a given city to add a TV station to its holdings, and you might have better, deeper journalism in both the paper and on television. Or you might just get more cost-cutting.

Overall, Jarvis’ tone suggests that because technology is breaking up the mediascape as we know it anyway, then we should let creative destruction take its course. Well, maybe. But economists like to talk about a “soft landing,” a way of managing a recession so that it causes as little human damage as possible. A soft landing for the news business as we know it wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

As I pointed out in a response to Jarvis’ post, FCC regulation was directly responsible for the golden age of television news in Boston. In the early 1970s, the FCC stripped the Boston Herald Traveler of its licenses for Channel 5 and a radio station. That allowed a community group to purchase Channel 5 and transform it into WCVB-TV, the most highly regarded local television news operation in the country during the 1970s and ’80s. Unfortunately, the investors eventually cashed in, and today Channel 5 is not much different from other corporate-owned stations. But that’s hardly an argument for deregulation. If anything, it’s an argument for requiring local ownership.

There’s no question that the FCC’s few remaining rules governing ownership seem increasingly archaic. Consider what the New York Times Co. has been able to do around here. In addition to the Boston Globe, it owns the Worcester Telegram & Gazette; nearly 14 percent of New England Sports Network; and 49 percent of Metro Boston. It also has a content-sharing arrangement with New England Cable News. (I’m only talking about media holdings. Let’s not forget that the Times Co. owns 17 percent of the Red Sox.) Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell, who has long lusted after a radio station, must wonder why it’s OK for the Times Co. to amass that much concentrated power in Eastern Massachusetts while FCC rules prevent him from making a move that would be important to his survival but that would be relatively trivial within the overall scheme of things.

Let me bring this up to date. We live in an era when some of the best news video appears on newspaper Web sites — when WashingtonPost.com, for instance, can win an Emmy. At some point very soon, the platform is going to become irrelevant. But that time hasn’t come yet, which is why I’m skeptical of what Martin is trying to do by loosening the cross-ownership ban. Let’s not get too far ahead of the technology.

The multimedia journalist

I’ve set up class blogs for the two courses I’m teaching this spring — Reinventing the News: The Journalism of the Web and Journalism Ethics and Issues. I expect I’ll be putting a lot of energy into those sites over the next few months. If you’re interested in what we’re talking about, I hope you’ll bookmark them or add them to your RSS reader.

I’ve already posted to Reinventing the News, using two examples from today’s Boston Globe to show that print journalists are now routinely stretching themselves with video and audio. Reinventing the News will also feature student blogs once the semester begins.

Online sidebars to the Everett fire

The local media have gone all out in their coverage of the Everett fire. I’m not going to try to evaluate it — from what I’ve seen, it’s all been good. Instead, I want to call your attention to what’s taking place just outside your peripheral vision.

Both the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald have done some interesting work on their Web sites. The Globe has two slide shows, one on the ground, the other from on high. The Herald has a gallery as well, although it’s on a page that doesn’t allow me to provide a direct link. Click here and scroll down.

I particularly like an interactive map the Globe has posted (above). It takes you through the accident step by step and gives you a much clearer idea of what happened than the static graphic that appears on page one of the print edition. The Globe is also asking readers to send in photos (I don’t see any yet) and to share their stories (so far, it looks like people are mainly interested in pointing out that the Globe has mislabeled Route 99 in some of its coverage).

The Herald has posted a couple of videos — a two-minute clip that was shot at the scene of the fire, and an interview with a witness. They’re not slick, but they have a compelling raw-video feel to them that you don’t get from television newscasts. Unfortunately, the Globe is hampered in experimenting with video because of its content-sharing arrangement with New England Cable News, several of whose stories are posted alongside the Globe’s content.

I was somewhat surprised that I couldn’t find any amateur content on Flickr. However, I did come across a nearly six-minute video on YouTube, taken at the scene, that was uploaded by someone who goes by “97K.” Overall, though, there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of citizen journalism coming out of the fire. Adam Gaffin, who does a great job of rounding up such things at Universal Hub, has very little. Adam did lead me to a local blog called the Everett Mirror (link now fixed; thanks, Ron), but so far there’s not much there, either. I’m not sure why, but it could be that Everett, as a working-class city, has fewer citizen-media types wielding video cameras than some other communities.

A little more than a year ago, an immense explosion in Danversport, right down the street from Media Nation, resulted in no deaths and little in the way of injuries. This week, another miracle occurred.

Happy Thanksgiving, Danversport

The Salem News and the Danvers Herald have put together multimedia packages to mark the anniversary of the Danversport explosion.

Some highlights from the News include audio of the 911 calls, before-and-after photos of the homes destroyed in the blast, slide shows and lots of stories. The front page from last year, with the headline ‘WE’RE ALL ALIVE,’ has gone interactive — click anywhere and you’ll get the story. There’s also an interactive map (above). When you roll your mouse over a property, a box pops up telling you how badly it was damaged in the explosion and what the repair status is.

The Herald package also features numerous stories, as well as a couple of videos and a narrated slide show. The slide show, in particular, is strikingly sharp and well-produced.

All in all, a fitting commemoration.

The Amazon Kindle and paid content

The Amazon Kindle is being marketed as the latest e-book, but I would imagine it will have a tough go of it on that basis. As Steven Levy observes in Newsweek, what could be a more perfect content-delivery system than the book? Instead, what I find intriguing is that it can be used as a portable, always-on virtual newspaper with — get this — paid subscriptions. If the Kindle succeeds, we may finally have a solution to the devastating revenue problem that newspaper and magazine publishers have created for themselves in giving away their content for free.

The Kindle strikes me as the purest realization to date of a vision I first heard articulated at a conference at Columbia University in the early 1990s. At that time, news executives fully understood that digital was the future. The idea was that content would be distributed on high-resolution digital tablets that would be so cheap they’d be given away. At night, you’d plug your tablet into the cable box on your television so that it could download newspapers, magazines and other content that you’d paid for. In the morning, you’d unplug it and take it with you. A wireless connection would allow for interactive advertising so that you could, say, make a reservation by clicking on a restaurant ad.

What we all missed, of course, was the rise of the Web, which made closed systems like that envisioned at Columbia impossible. Content quickly became free and ubiquitous. And you know the rest of the story. Yet even at a time when the idea of paying for content online is at a low ebb (the New York Times has gone entirely free, and the Wall Street Journal will soon follow suit), there remain considerable doubts that online advertising alone will ever fully support the public-service journalism we need. Just yesterday, the Times ran an intriguing op-ed by Discover columnist Jared Lanier, who argued that advertising will never add up to enough to pay the bills.

Enter the Kindle. Unlike the device we talked about at Columbia some 15 years ago, it’s not so cheap that publishers will give them away (indeed, it’s $400), and the e-ink resolution, though better than that of a typical computer screen, isn’t nearly as nice as a glossy magazine’s — a Kindle reportedly gives you 150 dots per inch, whereas even a cheap ink-jet printer will give you 600. But there are some features that are really appealing for news executives and consumers alike. For instance:

  • It’s small, portable and light, about the size of a thin paperback book. Yes, it easily passes the classic test: you can take it to the bathroom with you.
  • You don’t have to plug it in to a computer, and, because it’s connected to a cellular network, you don’t have to find a WiFi hot spot, either.
  • You can subscribe to newspapers such as the Times, the Journal and the Washington Post for considerably less than it would cost to get the print editions. The Kindle automatically downloads the entire paper, which means you are untethered from the Web. (Here is the list. The Boston Globe isn’t there, at least not yet.)

From the little bit that I’ve seen of the Kindle online, the newspapers look rather ugly. Obviously the Kindle will have to become enough of a success for newspaper designers to come up with something specifically optimized for a paperback-size vertical screen. Color would be nice, too.

The Kindle is hardly the only experiment in paid online content. The Times has something called TimesReader, which costs $15 per month and which, according to Jack Shafer, is much easier on the eyes than the Web site. (No Mac version, so I haven’t been able to test it.) But TimesReader requires you to lug your laptop around, which makes the Kindle a much more portable solution.

I do have doubts about the Kindle. It’s easy to imagine a Kindle-killer — a similar device that lets you browse the free Web via a WiFi connection and download content so that you can read it even when you’re disconnected. (We can already catch a glimmer of such devices with Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch, though I don’t want to read on a screen that small.) The free-content paradigm is powerful, and may prove too difficult to overcome.

But the Kindle does offer a possible alternative to the free, Web-based regime that has been such a boon to consumers and a bane to publishers. I hope the Kindle is at least enough of a success so that we can arrive at some judgments over the next few years.

Update: Peter Kafka of Silicon Alley Insider thinks I’m full of it, writing, “The existence of the plan has made at least gulled at least [sic! sic! sic!] one blogger, MediaNation’s Dan Kennedy, into imagining that the Kindle will help save the newspaper industry.”

Kafka notes that the Kindle has a built-in Web browser, which means you could read newspapers for free. But he fails to acknowledge that the paid versions of those papers might make for a much better reading experience, especially since you can download them ahead of time.

Update II: Actually, I’m not sure the Kindle does include a Web browser. I can’t find anything here. I would also note that Amazon touts “free built-in access” to Wikipedia, which suggests that there is no generalized browser. Otherwise, why make a big deal about Wikipedia?

Update III: It does, but not a very good one. From Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch:

In addition to being a book reader, the Kindle has some experimental features. One is a limited Web browser customized for the device with some preselected bookmarks including Amazon.com (in case you want to buy a digital camera instead of a book, which you can do just fine from the main Kindle shopping page), Wikipedia, Google, BBC News, Yahoo Finance, Weather Underground, and the Yellow Pages.

You can also enter any URL, including Bloglines (but not Google Reader, which requires Javascript and which the Kindle browser does not support). So here is a Kindle hack: you can check out your RSS feeds for the New York Times or the full feed of blogs like TechCrunch for free using the browser, rather than choose to pay a subscription to get them downloaded to the Kindle. I don’t have high hopes for the Kindle’s ability to bring back subscription revenues for publishers of any kind.

We’ll have to wait and see.

More on Boston.com

Two more points about the redesigned Boston Globe site at Boston.com:

  • Once you get past an ad and a few teasers (including one for “Government Center,” a terrific resource that can be hard to find), a good chunk of the right-hand column is taken up with “Reporter’s Questions” — possible future stories for which reporters are seeking information. This feature has been around for years, but I’ve never seen it displayed so prominently. All smart news organizations are looking for ways to build communities around their journalism, and this is one way to do it.
  • The blogs may be getting short shrift on the Boston.com front, but they’re being promoted heavily on the Globe page. Just scroll down the left-hand column a bit. So are the podcasts, which have been organized and promoted in such a way that I may give a few a try now.

More thoughts on Boston.com

The FAQ that accompanies the redesigned Boston.com says that more change is coming: “Different features and sections of the site are scheduled to debut on different days. While we realize that this might be confusing in the short-term, we’ve studied our options carefully and believe that the gradual switch we have planned will ultimately result in a better user experience.”

With that in mind, here are a few random observations offered in the hope that better things are yet to come.

The look. By switching from a tiny sans serif font to the same one used by corporate cousin NYTimes.com, the site is automatically more attractive and readable. I’ve heard complaints that the Boston.com front is too crowded. It is, but it’s less crowded than before. The front also seems a bit newsier than it did previously, with the wacky, offbeat stuff moved farther down the page. The Boston Globe front would benefit from the same look, and I assume that’s coming.

Split personality. One problem I’ve had with Boston.com for a long time is that the site comes across as very different from the electronic Globe. That stems in part from its legacy. Although the Globe has always been the driving force behind Boston.com, it started out as a partnership with media outlets such as Boston magazine, Banker & Tradesman and New England Cable News. These days, it’s pretty much just the Globe, with video from NECN and New England Sports Network. But the split personality remains. Particularly frustrating is the fact that the Globe site conspires at every turn to dump you into Boston.com, whether you want to go there or not.

There are also cool features on Boston.com, like the “Government Center” collection of databases, that are maddeningly difficult to find.

Now, some of this is just a naming convention. Both NYTimes.com and washingtonpost.com let you choose that day’s print edition, which isn’t much different from Boston.com’s letting you choose that day’s Globe. But Boston.com has always struck me as flightier and more superficial, more separated from the core journalistic mission, than those other sites. As I said above, maybe that’s changing. I hope so.

Sharing. The hot trend of the moment is technology that lets you share stories you like on various social networks. Washingtonpost.com is particularly strong on this, letting you post stories to Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit, Newsvine, Facebook and something called StumbleUpon, which is a new one on me. The Globe’s options are relatively paltry, limited to just Digg, Facebook and del.icio.us.

Comments. As Adam Reilly notes, Boston.com still doesn’t allow you to post comments to stories. I know that the issue has been one of computer capacity, but come on, folks – buy some servers. (Yes, the site does have message boards, but that’s rather old-fashioned.)

More stories like what? I found a new feature this morning, but it needs some work. Example: Go to Shelley Murphy’s story on MIT’s lawsuit against the architect Frank Gehry, scroll down a bit, and you’ll find a box titled “MORE STORIES LIKE THIS.” Here’s what you’ll find:

  • Patrick to consider replacing police details with flagmen
  • United Tech profit up
  • Massachusetts high schools vying to update old science labs
  • State to study plans for school construction

Obviously the algorithm needs some work.

Almost forgotten. The link to Boston.com/Globe blogs has been moved to the very bottom of the Boston.com front, which doesn’t strike me as a smart move. The outside blogs section needs serious updating. Let me point out just one example: Under “Politics & the media,” you will not find Reilly’s Don’t Quote Me or David Bernstein’s Talking Politics, both at ThePhoenix.com; Jessica Heslam’s Messenger Blog, at BostonHerald.com; or (ahem) Media Nation.

With the Herald unveiling a redesign in September, we can see two different philosophies at work. The Herald has done something rather daring — it has almost completely broken the tie between its Web site and its print edition. Stories are posted blog-style, in reverse chronological order, throughout the day, with no differentiation made between wire copy and staff-written stories. It’s impossible to know whether some of those stories ever made their way into the print edition. And though the Herald is not exactly rolling in cash, publisher Pat Purcell has somehow found enough computer capacity to allow comments.

That said, BostonHerald.com can be easier to admire than to use. You’re constantly forced to drill down through submenus of submenus. I also find that I’m often missing stuff that I would have seen if I’d picked up a print edition. The solution I’ve hit upon — subscribing to RSS feeds for the sections of the paper I’m most interested in — isn’t entirely satisfying, as I feel as though I’m missing the flavor of the site.

The philosophy at the Globe, on the other hand, is evidently to take the Globe as a starting point and to build on it. It comes across as being similar to NYTimes.com and washington.com, only not quite as smoothly implemented — at least not yet.

These are interesting times for newspapers. New circulation figures show that print continues its free-fall. At the same time, efforts are under way to find new ways of measuring total newspaper readership, online and in print. As my Northeastern colleague Steve Burgard tells the Globe today, “You’ve actually got more eyeballs looking at journalism than ever before.”

By putting so much of their resources into the Web, executives at the Globe and the Herald show that they understand print’s days are numbered.