A 2013 timeline for newspapers to go mobile
Clyde Bentley at the University of Missouri offers a timeline for “Mobile Newspaper Success”… The road to 2013: A timeline for newspapers.
Responding to a Gartner Research study that forecast mobile devices will replace PCs in Web access by 2013, Bentley built a timeline from the endpoint to the present.
Result: If you’re a “key editor” at a newspaper, you should get a smartphone this month, or you’re already playing catch-up.
By August-September, Clyde says, newspapers should be training their news and ad staff on “mobile potential,” if they want to stay on track with the Gartner deadline. Within a year, mobile reporters should be producing niche-market features for mobile customers. Clyde’s examples: “Smoke-break wraps, during-game scores, pre-commute weather.”
More on that, and my own dumb experience with smartphones, here:
Tell Clyde I’m on the road to Floyd with a Droid
ONN: Decline of newspapers threatens a lifestyle
How Will The End Of Print Journalism Affect Old Loons Who Hoard Newspapers?
Suggested “bacronym” for LOON: Lovers of Old Newspapers. Count me in…
Bob
Society for News Design launches new design
The Society for News Design has an updated website for the new year, pledging to be “a dynamic representation of our evolving organization… inclusive… multi-platform… aggressively forward-looking,” according to SND President Kris Viesselman’s announcement.
In the inclusiveness department, SND’s former “Best of Newspaper Design™” competition changed its name last year to the “Best of News Design™” Creative Competition and opened the competition to all magazines, not just newspaper Sunday supplements.
(Presumably all entries for this year’s competition are on their way to Syracuse, since they are due Wednesday. Entries from outside the U.S. are accepted for another week.)
SND has a separate Multimedia Design competition, with quarterly and annual awards. Newspapers’ Web sites (The New York Times in particular) led last year’s honorees.
For this month, the new SND site features a “Designing the next decade” video interview with Roger Black (transcript included), an interview with programmer-journalist Adrian Holovaty of Everyblock.com, and a survey of newspaper and magazine presentations reviewing the past decade, “Finding some heroes of the ‘Zeros’ coverage.”
The main SND site now incorporates SND’s Update blog; also see the SNDEast blog by Lee Steele, design editor of the Connecticut Post and Region 1 SND director.
Examiner of Chronicle: Future Foreshadowed in Fog Features?
“An obituary does not propose a solution,” Richard Rodriguez observes toward the end of his Harper’s Magazine article, Final edition: Twilight of the American newspaper.
“When a newspaper dies in America, it is not simply that a commercial enterprise has failed; a sense of place has failed. If the San Francisco Chronicle is near death—and why else would the editors celebrate its 144th anniversary? and why else would the editors devote a week to feature articles on fog?—it is because San Francisco’s sense of itself as a city is perishing.”
If you haven’t guessed, it’s not an optimistic article, but Rodriguez tells a good story and knows how to save a special phrase for the end of a sentence…
“Newspapers have become deadweight commodities linked to other media commodities in chains that are coupled or uncoupled by accountants and lawyers and executive vice presidents and boards of directors in offices thousands of miles from where the man bit the dog and drew ink…”
Personally (and this is a blog, after all), the article makes me want to go write my own 6,000 word magazine article, mingling nostalgia for my Daily Hampshire Gazette paper route and my old Hartford Courant bureau reporting with something optimistic about the future of journalism.
But I’m too busy catching up on some real news in both those papers… It’s a fire story, of all the traditional newspaper things! And covered by both with all the latest online tools, from YouTube video to Google Maps mashups. That first link was to the Courant (est. 1764), where I saw the story yesterday; here’s the Gazette (est. 1786), and my old hometown paper does appear to be doing a good job of local reporting in a crisis.
Calls for papers: Newspapers, new media & election ’08
How did newspapers, their online counterparts and other “legacy media” cover — and use — Facebook and other interactive tools in the 2088 presidential campaign?
That’s one of the questions posed in a call for papers issued by Tom Johnson of Texas Tech, editor of a special issue of Mass Communication and Society on social media and the 2008 election.
Texas Tech also plans a mid-April conference on New Media Theory, which may be of interest to Newspaper Division members, Johnson said. Both the conference and the journal special issue have submission deadlines in January.
NYTimes leads multimedia design awards
The Best of Multimedia Design 2009 winners include two gold, two silver awards and seven awards of excellence for NewYorkTimes.com.
A Judges’ Special Recognition Award also went to nytimes.com, “to acknowledge their work in raising the bar for special events coverage with Election 2008,” according to the SND citation.
Among the Times winners:
* Choosing a President (gold award)
* You Finish, You Win (gold award)
* One in 8 Million (silver award)
* Tracking US Airways Flight 1549 (silver award)
Other silver awards went to:
* Andaman Rising carolinaphotojournalism.org
* Hurricane Tracker msnbc.com
* Indy 500 Car Tracker indystar.com
* Ted Kennedy boston.com
For the full list of winners, and judges’ comments, see SND Update: The Best of Multimedia Design Winners
