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Saving Journalism With Flash and Java
An anonymous reader writes "New York magazine has a story about some of the flashy new ideas that are coming out of the labs of the New York Times. The piece prompted Peter Wayner to dig up some of the old Java applets he wrote to explore whether more promiscuity really stops AIDS and whether baseball can do anything to speed up the games. He notes that these took a great deal of work to produce and it's not possible to do them on a daily basis. Furthermore, they're cranky and fragile, perhaps thanks to Java. Are cool, interactive features the future of journalism on the web? Or will simple ASCII text continue to be the most efficient way for us to mingle our thoughts, especially when ASCII text won't generate a classloading error?"
The question should be: Does a move away from traditional ways of serving news, mean the end of journalism? This is more hand wringing by print media about their waning fortunes. In fact TV, newspapers and news magazines didn't realize we were in a recession, because their revenue stream (advertising) was enhanced by the high spending presidential election. More and more stories are broken outside traditional media. The real story is how do journalists continue to do their job without the structure of a newspaper or wire service.
Technology can help illustrate a good story, of course.
However, the story is the key. What we need much more of, what the real savior of newspapers will be, it hard-hitting, in-depth investigations, and scoops. This worked for Hearst, among others. And the World really needs critical, trained, intelligent people examining what our corporations, our governments and their agents are up to, now more than ever in history.
Any blogger can paraphrase an AP feed, it doesn't take brains. This is what newspapers have been concentrating on in the past few years, while ignoring actual journalism.
Also, there's plenty examples of how technology is misused in TV media. Bugs, hyperbole-laced graphics, and skewed graphs. Let's not replicate that either. Let's not see powerpoint presentation news. By all means illustrate the facts, but make sure you have the facts too.
Really, they should partner with Amazon to get their papers delivered to the Kindle automatically for a subscription fee.
Also, Amazon should release an ebook reader designed for netbooks.
Both would go a long way toward getting revenue for their publications.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Only if you're looking at the title alone.
I actually work tech at a big media organization, so this is something I think about constantly, and the article is a perfect example of the media missing the goddamn point.
The way to persist is to deliver a better product. Print journalism is by far the most prolific news medium in existence, and traditional print newspapers are still the biggest providers of that content...right now.
But increasingly they're cutting jobs and reducing the quality of their physical product in order to try and retain their profitability, and, magically, it's not helping their product.
At the same time they're investing in ideas like the ones described in the article, which are 100% substance-free, cute little web 2.0 widgets that may occupy a few minutes of someone's time, but don't add any lasting value to the product, and don't pull the new users they need (people like us), but instead appeal primarily to the same technophobes who are their core market already.
What they need to do is push an actual, meaningful, web presence, one with persistence, where content lasts longer than a week or so, and where the web content is clear, clean, and accessible to aggregators and search engines, so they can take advantage of the long tail.
It's inevitable that the print product is going to get superceded by a web product. The industry is dragging its feet, however, on really dealing out a first class web product, and so they're basically guaranteeing that when the first really savvy web-based news organization comes along, that they're going to get their marketshare ripped away.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Bluntly? If your news page is filled with flash and java, I'll close the browser never to return. If you have no content and have to mask it with flashy graphics, I don't want to hear your story.
It's the same with news networks. Ever watched the news recently? It's flashy "breaking news" jingles and enough FX to make the average hollywood movie drop its jaw in awe (which, btw, also rely more and more on flashy explosions and FX to hide that the script is thin enough to fit in a standard envelope), but where's the beef?
JibJab summed it up quite nicely.
Gimme news! Gimme information! And keep your flashy crap!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Except consumers want video. Our web site was going down the tube, and another local site was getting more hits than us. Video was the #1 reason. Now we produce our own video.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.