Starting points for this post:
- MoJo needs your help to narrow down more than twenty ideas to just three.
- If you're joining late, you should probably start here and then go here.
- Today we explore challenges that would innovate on the delivery of news.
- We want your help: How would you prioritize these? What would you add? What would you want to work on?
Each of the ideas falls roughly into one of six categories of news production:
- Reporting
- Presenting
- Delivering
- Searching & curating
- Listening to news users & enabling news users
- Funding & sustaining news
The list below tries to distill those ideas into their essence. Please keep in mind that these are rough drafts that outline just the kernel of the idea; the selected ideas will be developed into comprehensive challenge questions.
Okay, let's jump into the question of "Delivering news."
Delivering news
From news applications, to Web applications: As journalists learn to program, and as "computer-assisted reporting" becomes known as just reporting, it begs the question: what will today's "news application developers" be freed to develop in just a few short years? More than searchable databases and explorable maps, the current direction of the open Web is enabling new kinds of experiences -- experiences that break out of the frame, are location aware, and can store data off-line. Laptops are smaller, mobile devices more powerful, and the Web is still (contrary to popular belief) frequently at the center of people's computing experiences. Given these factors, what will tomorrow's news applications look like?
Adaptable experiences: From the New York Times experimental "Chrome Web App" to Zeit Online's focus on delivering a tablet-optimized news experience, news organizations are starting to think about delivering adaptable news experiences. As these experiments explore how to "re-flow" news for different devices and form factors, the news reading landscape continues to change -- new devices are announced almost weekly, while unusual suspects try to deliver the Web on a variety of existing hardware (think Microsoft's Kinect for Xbox 360). What new tools can help news organizations to keep up, while also pushing the boundaries of what's possible?
Cross-platform delivery It's clear that Apple has not vanquished Windows on mobile devices, Android will not unseat iOS, and the Blackberry operating system is not going away any time soon (in fact, there are three different versions in wide use currently, the older OS 5, the newer OS 6, and their "Tablet OS"). Beyond those market-leading platforms, there are more still that power mobile experiences, like Web OS, Symbian, and so on. Add to that the use of alternative browsers like Opera Mini and Firefox for mobile, and it presents a challenging landscape for mobile-optimized news delivery. This challenge is multiplied when you think about delivering news content beyond simple text, for example: video & audio reports, photo essays, primary-source documents, interactive features, and so on. As HTML5 and JavaScript support appear on these new devices, what opportunities does that open up for cross-platform news delivery?
The semantic Web: More than 500 newspapers in the US have implemented the hNews standard, while others are using RDF or microdata to add machine-readable, semantic, markup to news stories. On top of semantic data, new experiences and products can be built. Take for example the BBC's use of RDF to power their World Cup coverage, or the AP's use of hNews for their News Registry product. However, it's likely that these examples just scratch the surface of what's possible in an open Web that is rich with machine-readable news -- even more so if the number of news organizations using it grows from 500 to 5000. What other news delivery innovations does a semantic Web make possible for news organizations? What does it enable for news users?
What grabs you from the list above, based on your experiences? How would you prioritize these? What ideas would you add to the "Delivering news" category? Which challenge would you want to solve?
Feel free to comment here, or on the MoJo community mailing list (or via whatever medium suits your fancy).
Next up: Searching & curating. Join the march.
Comments
4 Comments
So much can be done with HTML5 that apps seem more about distribution than functionality. An app should be the choice only where it provides something that would otherwise be impossible in an open format. Don't waste resources just because it's the cool thing to do.
A lot of the questions you bring up touch on the fact that some people will be consuming the news via multiple devices. One untouched area that might be considered personalization is how to build your experience around the several devices you own.
Let's start with folks who read the news from a single device. If they revisit the front page of a news site in 1-hour intervals, are they following a late-breaking story, or do they want the old links they visited to disappear?
As you move to multi-device users, you have two delivery considerations: synchronization and device cooperation. Synchronization is easy in HTML5 apps. Assuming I have some smart solution for the single-device questions I mentioned earlier, the user is already accessing a central webapp for their content, and their access patterns are the recorded across devices. With device-specific apps, you need more app-specific instrumentation to generate a centralized access log.
Device cooperation is also important. If you're not delivering the same experience across devices, how can they still act in concert? For example, maybe I can get alerts to my phone, mark the ones I want to revisit, and the next time I visit the homepage on my laptop, I have an instapaper-like queue of articles to read.
@Matt There are certainly times when a native application is going to be the way to go. Currently, HTML5 mobile apps are _good_, but not *great*, and much harder to charge for (if that's something a publisher wanted to do). Technologies like PhoneGap and Titanium *start* to solve some of the challenges by wapping a HTML5 app in a native app shell. But, based on where things are today, it doesn't appear like there's going to be fewer OSs out there, so that's a challenging strategy to keep up. Advances in the browser on mobile devices seems promising, but better tools need to be available to take advantage of them.
@Adam This is a great challenge question on its own. :) If you don't mind, I'm going to add it to the list. Thank!
I certainly don't mind:). It will be great to hear the community's solutions!