The future of journalism

I got thinking recently about what the future holds for journalism and journalists. Partly, this was brought on by the fact that Rupert Murdoch's Times and Sunday Times are soon going behind pay-walls, partly by the fact that one of the sites I was working on, nosmag.com (content in Irish, but I'm sure Google translate would do a job on it for you if necessary) seems to have become rather more than just a bit quiet of late.

There are many reasons nós* has been struggling, and not all that many of them are down to "the way journalism's going", but the fact that nós* is struggling has made me wonder about stepping on my editor's toes, so to speak, and going out on my own with the concept of an Irish language lifestyle blog/magazine type thing. Now if you're reading this Tomaí, I'd rather keep writing for nós*, but the fact is that there hasn't been any real content there since Christmas, and you're pretty much ignoring my e-mails, so...

Anyway, this train of thought obviously led me to wonder what I'd need to do to make a site like nós* had succeed. A lot of stuff, I can more or less steal as is from Tomaí's work - the content is mostly pretty good, and there's a pretty good range of stuff. The tone is generally nicely pitched too - there are serious bits, but mostly it's a fun-loving, light hearted kinda production, and I always liked that. The design's good too, particularly the print edition (all available here, if you'd like to see what I mean). And there are other things too, which I might get to in a future post.

The problems, however, are pretty clear too, especially the big ones. The site was never effectively monetised, and this meant that even while (relatively) huge money was going into producing a very nice glossy magazine, nobody was getting paid. There were ads, but seemingly not enough, and the cover price of the magazine (a not-for-nothing €3-80, I think) went straight back into production costs. People who aren't being paid are generally not terribly reliable workers, at least not long-term, and even while I did my best to keep my submissions timely and of high quality I kinda knew that Tomaí was having difficulties getting enough good content to justify bothering to publish the thing. And content wasn't the only thing causing problems - the way the finances were structured meant that new subscribers were constantly needed to keep producing the magazines that the old subscribers had paid for. (For the record, even though I think this was never a particularly good business practice, I don't think there was ever anything really dishonest going on - it wasn't a case of money being siphoned off to pay for fancy offices or champagne receptions or anything. That's not going to be much consolation for those who are out of pocket after paying for magazines that may or may not be produced, but I think it's important to make the point that as far as I'm concerned there wasn't anything too shady happening).

So what's the biggest lesson to learn from nós*? Well there are quite a few big ones, but for me the biggest thing that the next nós* (if there ever is a successor) needs to do is monetise the site before even thinking about paper publishing. My theory for this is a pretty simple concept, but one I'm seriously considering taking a punt on. Essentially, if a pay wall is the most lucrative way of monetising a site then that's the road that needs to be gone down, but a pay wall will obviously put people off before they even start, so you need a pay wall which allows people to peep over and see what they're missing. One option would be to offer a free trial - maybe 7 days or a month, depending on how often content is posted. This is imperfect too though, in that you're going to lose readers who would have generated a little extra revenue from ads but who won't pay to read (not to mention that having more or readers is, in general terms, always a good thing). So you adopt the Radiohead model (it was Radiohead, wasn't it?). Pay what you like, but you have to renew annually, or maybe every six months or every quarter if you don't pay anything. I'm willing to bet that there are enough people out there who will like the model that you could generate pretty serious revenue this way (serious relative to ads, at any rate), and the recurrent nature of the subscription would mean that even people who don't pay the first time they subscribe might come around to the idea of paying for content if they've been regularly enjoying the site for some time. Now this isn't a perfect system, and I still haven't got the technical details worked out (how will RSS feeds work from behind a pay wall, for example? And how difficult is a pay wall to implement, anyway?), but I think that it could very well prove a workable model for a site which can produce good enough content to justify charging for it.

Content, of course, is king, and no matter what site you're talking about, if the content isn't right it simply won't be effectively monetised by even the Richard Bransons and Seth Godins of this world. If the content is right though - who knows? What everyone knows, however, is that the first person to figure out the whole "monetising a site" thing will be in some serious demand from the big guys (or at the very least the big guys will want to steal their ideas).

I've got some more flesh to add to this idea, but I think that offers a reasonable starting point for anyone who wants to steal my ideas. If you do make your fortune off them, I think that a pint or two might be in order?

Of Evolutions, Revolutions and Two Young Men Named Steve

So, I leave for 9 months and the whole world goes crazy? Not that I want to make any suggestions about correlation equalling causation, but if the boot fits...

But stop a moment – the world's been crazy for just about ever, you say, what in particular are you talking about? Well, the two Steves of the title are one Steve Jobs, who recently released what just might be the most disappointing piece of technology in a very long time (or might not), and one Stephen Fry, who as far as I can make out is just about the only person on the planet who isn't horribly disappointed about the finally unveiled iPad. More of that anon.

First, what really exciting, crazy happenings have happened in the past nine months which I absolutely must comment on? Well, flicking through notes I've had for my news section in nós*, there's not a lot jumping out at me that needs my late-to-the-game dissecting. Android is the notable exception to this, finally stepping out of the shadows and in handsets like the Hero and Nexus One really giving Apple something to think about. While on the subject of HTC, their press person in charge of promotions on this small island has promised that I can have a Hero to play with at some point in the very near future, and this will (fingers crossed) be followed by a Nexus One when that makes its way across the pond. Stay touched for a blog post (or two) once I've had some time with either or both of them. Although I haven't really had the chance to play with it just yet, Android represents what everyone wished the iPhone to be – an open, powerful and flexible platform which all of geekdom can get behind. The other area which still holds some serious intrigue is the whole netbook/tablet/smart phone/laptop, will they, won't they, mish-mash of a mobile computing shootout which has being going on around us for really quite a while now. This iPad business ties right into that, so with the assumption that I'll get to phones in particular at some point in the near future, what of this newest "game changer" from Apple?

Well, like everyone else in the world, I dismissed it immediately upon seeing it. No e-ink, no flash, no USB port, still need a PC or proper MAC, no multi-tasking, no really sensible way of using it – what's the point? And then I thought some more, and I still thought that. I mean, what were they thinking? Steve Jobs may have been the genius behind the iPhone, which I admit to lusting after for quite some time now, but surely he'd lost his way really, really badly this time? And then I thought some more, and still couldn't figure out what I could say that wouldn't be exactly the same as what everyone was already thinking, and then finally I watched the video the other Steve posted about it for Newsnight, and I started to twig what was going on. Now don't get me wrong, I still think it is very much a missed opportunity, and I also still think that it isn't actually all that good. To ladle the conditions on a bit more, I very much recognise the fact that Stephen Fry has a serious amount of fanboy-ism to him, even if it is wrapped up in an almost unprecedentedly sophisticated package, and I still think that the fact that you need another computer to actually use the tablet means it misses out on an entire section of its potential market, albeit a relatively small section. But...

I think it is a game changer, or at least will be. There, I said it. And before you splutter and hit back a few times, I know it's not that good, really I do, and I honestly don't even own so much as an iPod, never mind anything else by Apple. Thing is though, that UI has always been key in the mobile sector (even more so than in other sectors, where it's also pretty important). Stephen Fry recognised this in the iPhone around the same time I did (although he had the good sense to commit his thoughts to print, whereas I didn't). I think it's somewhere in this article (which is worth reading anyway, even if I've grabbed the wrong link) that although the very first iPhone mightn't be perfect, come version 3 it'd be pretty bloody close. Somewhere in the same article (or maybe it was somewhere else, I'm just going off the top of my head here) he pointed out that the UI was key. I had my first play with the iPhone less than a month after its release, in an Apple store in central Chicago, and that UI was just... wow. They just know how to make a UI in a way that nobody else can approach (although I do quite like a lot of what Microsoft have done with Windows 7). So even back then, when the iPhone didn't have 3G, and it didn't have GPS, and the app store didn't exist, that UI was gonna find it a pretty big following pretty quickly (those who are being particularly pernickety will point out that by the time I made this pronouncement the iPhone had already shifted something in the order of 100,000 units (or was it 200,000?). I can only counter this by pointing out that I don't actually keep track of sales figures while on holidays, nor did I then, and the queue had just about disappeared by the time I made to the Apple store).

Anyway, the iPhone started out pretty mundane, in many ways, but the UI meant it found a huge following and could keep selling while Apple figured out what people wanted it to do. The iPad will follow a similar pattern – right now, it doesn't really do anything, and so will sell "only" a few hundred thousand units. People will use it, whether on the move or on the couch, for watching videos and reading newspapers, even though a netbook could probably do just as good a job for the former, and an e-reader very much has the edge in the latter. In time though, things will change. V2 will more than likely see the introduction of a camera for video conferencing (although I still amn't too sure if people actually do that outside a business setting – I've used my webcam all of about three times), and some other improvements under the hood. By version 3, I don't think an e-ink screen is out of the question (this all depends on there being colour e-ink screens available at a reasonable price point in that sort of time scale, but that could very definitely happen. Well, maybe). Certainly they'll have introduced multi-tasking of some sort by then (rumour has it that could happen this year), and wireless USB could well have rendered the lack of a USB port irrelevant, at least as long as there are drivers made available. We'll hopefully see haptic feedback too, and the pictures make it look as if a svelter bezel mightn't go amiss (although they haven't changed the iPhone form-factor since release, so this one might well not happen for some time). Whatever improvements are made though, it'll improve, and people will get used to the idea of computers in all sorts of places where people didn't use computers before, and suddenly I won't be the one guy on the bus using a laptop (or at least, I'll be using a laptop while drooling over the iPads that everyone else has). People will use them on the couch at home. People who need to carry around clipboards all day will come around to the idea of being able to check their e-mails while they're at it. People will use them in cars (hopefully not while driving), and people will have them as fashion accessories, pulling them out at Starbucks or wherever they might happen to be to check the weather, send a quick e-mail and just generally let people know that they're at the cutting edge of the ever-advancing torrent of Apple-chic. And this all ignoring the crowd who'll buy them because they look just like those really cool future computers from half the sci-fi movies/programmes ever released.

Now, I might be wrong. I've been wrong before. Apple have been wrong before too – Apple TV was only released 4 years ago, let's remember, and that utter failure of a device is still on sale, as far as I know. Still, Apple don't often get it wrong, and for my money the netbook is a very good concept, but far enough from being a great one that there's room for the tablet in there somewhere. What's more, content still isn't really optimised for the netbook, whereas with Apple doing the heavy-pushing there will be a whole torrent of people making content specifically for tablets, including Apple themselves pushing e-books and e-newspapers (or whatever we're calling digital papers these days). Content is king, after all. That's why in 3 years time, Stephen Fry and I will be sitting smugly reading articles by the same people who wrote off the iPad, talking about how it has revolutionised mobile computing, and laughing at how remarkable their turnaround was.

 

(I should probably admit that others have also gone against the tide of negative public opinion, most notably (to me at least) Anand Lal Shimpi from AnandTech, who has an excellent piece online here. But we're still very much in the minority).