ATT responding to competition with good mobile data deal?

Unless I'm missing something, ATT appears to be responding to pressure in the industry with a mobile data deal worth looking at for existing customers.

It's at http://att.com/mobilesharevalue

It's offering 10GB/month of data for $100, but then per-device fees that would look to save money for someone who has one of the intermediate data levels (from 2 to 6GB).

I'm on the 1GB plan right now, and while it doesn't save me money, it does up my data tenfold for the same price (and I actually save a bit because of my discount that applies to the data plan, but not the devices).

So, I know you are going to ask. No, I am not shilling for Big Mobile. No inducements, threats, etc. I discovered it yesterday while spending an hour on the phone with a service rep trying to link my old DSL/home phone account with wireless after moving over from Sprint (which probably could have kept me had it just extended my discount to all the charges, not just its data plan). (An hour? Yeah, AT&T's MyATT site is a flaming, inscrutable mess. And the site above is no gem -- while it talks about this plan at the top, when I sign on it's still confusing because in the middle it seems to be giving you the old pricing.)

Anyhow, I scrubbed the fine print pretty thoroughly and couldn't find any trapdoors, so I signed up to change. If you see something I've missed, let me know. Otherwise, it might be worth checking out. But as always, caveat emptor.

Google Glass - snow day

Starting to experiment with Google Glass. Today's a rare snow day in S.C. So, of course, I had to take a picture through glass:

https://plus.google.com/100106070217944231882/posts/Kf3kjtsTn7V

Once I did that, then I had to take a video:

August column: Why we must write more concisely

Here is this month's column sent to press associations around the country:

Why we must write more concisely

It's almost impossible to go a day without new statistics illustrating how our audience is quickly shifting to mobile devices.

The Census Bureau says almost half the U.S. population 15 and older has a smartphone. The Pew Research Center puts it even higher, 56 percent. A significant number say they use their phone as the main way to get online.

But we still do too much writing as if the reader will lean back with "the paper" in an easy chair. We have to change. Even our "print" writing will benefit.

People using mobile devices consume information in short bursts as time allows. They aren't thrilled with ledes and paragraphs that sprawl over two or three small screens.

Raju Narisetti, a former reporter who oversaw digital strategy at both The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, recalls a Post story on corruption in Alaska. It had the great anecdotal lead, solid nut graf, great detail. Only it took seven smartphone screens to get to the nut and 46 to finish.

"You have to start pivoting from creating just content to creating a great experience and creating different experiences on different devices. And it's hard," he told the Nieman Journalism Lab.

But it often can mean just sharpening a lead's focus, like this one:

A Colorado man who may be linked to the slaying of Colorado's state prison chief died from gunshot wounds received in a shootout with Texas police, law enforcement officials said Friday.

Most people will correctly conclude that a shootout means he was shot. And the story quickly explains he was shot by police. So tighten it from 31 to 25 words:

A Colorado man possibly linked to the slaying of that state's prison chief died after a shootout with Texas police, law enforcement officials said Friday.

Sometimes we can't shorten that much, but we can bring the focus firmly atop that first screen:

New public documents reveal that government concerns over the potential of a catastrophic failure of the Jocassee Dam flooding the Oconee Nuclear Station downstream stretch back more than three decades.

I think the point for most people will be that it's been more than 30 years (why the journalese "three decades"). And we can drop "downstream," taking 30 words to 26:

For more than 30 years, government officials have feared catastrophic failure of the Jocassee Dam could flood the Oconee Nuclear Station, according to newly released documents.

The next paragraph illustrates how we're also prone to pile clauses and thoughts into one sentence. Let's use the period more. Not only does it give readers a breather, it also allows some "responsive" Web designs to break the graf, depending on the screen size:

The documents – once held back for security reasons but released recently by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission under the Freedom of Information Act – also illustrate a protracted and jagged path to nuclear regulators' demands today that the station's owner, Duke Energy, do more to protect against the threat.

Slightly reworked, with the focus again moved to the top:

The documents show a protracted and jagged path to current regulators' demands that Oconee's owner, Duke Energy, do more to protect against the threat. They had been withheld for security reasons but were released recently by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission under the Freedom of Information Act.

You can probably find numerous examples in your paper and on your website. If you want an idea of how things will look on a small screen, you can use online tools like responsinator.com or quirktools.com/screenfly.

Those who say long-form is dead forget the Internet can deliver those narratives to customers willing to pay for them just as easily as it can deliver mobile-focused formats. But we probably will end up having to write multiple versions. Sadly, it comes at a time when editors, who would be the ones to add value doing this, are being cut.

For Pew's periodically updated statistics on mobile, go to http://pewinternet.org/Commentary/2012/February/Pew-Internet-Mobile.aspx

For Narisetti's extended Q&A, go to: http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/03/monday-qa-raju-narisetti-on-designing-for-mobile-the-paywall-fallacy-and-reinventing-ads/

iPhone donated as 'artifact'

For the "how to feel old" files -- when an iPhone 4S is being donated to a museum as an "artifact" of the new era of journalism.

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/195707/wtop-mojo-pioneer-donates-iphone-to-the-newseum/

Oops, gotta run. My beeper is going off {grinnnnnnn}.

Another Dewey vs. Truman moment - Augusta, Ga.

This is the sort of thing guaranteed to ruin your day -- count the votes from only one county in a multicounty congressional race, as I'm told one Augusta, Ga., TV station did, and end up calling it for the wrong person:

WJBF later got it right on the Web.

A different way to look at new community newspapers study

A new study from the Reynolds Institute and the National Newspaper Association is being framed as "readers in areas served by community newspapers continue to prefer the community newspaper as their sources of local news and advertising."


From the release:

The survey, in its sixth year, shows consistent trends.  

Readers prefer the printed copy to the online version, with 48 percent saying they never read the local news online. 

They prefer to receive advertising through the newspaper (51%) instead of on the Internet (11%). And only about a quarter of respondents said they had found local news through a mobile device in the past 30 days. Slightly more (38%) said they had received local shopping information by mobile device.  

They also have a strong preference for government accountability through newspaper public notice, with 80 percent saying the government should be required to publish notices in the newspaper.

Let me suggest a slightly different interpretation. If a quarter of your market said it was using a device to access your product -- in this case mobile -- would that be an "only" to you or a cause for management to start thinking strategically in that area?

If more than a third said they received local shopping information on a platform -- mobile -- and the suggestion was that perhaps not all of them are going to your site, would that be a cause for concern? Or are you willing to write off more than a third of your audience - a segment likely to grow? (Unfortunately, the release talks about a "trend," but provides no trend data or a link to the time series raw data files. You should also read the footnote to the study carefully because the methodology has changed a bit.)


Yes, it's clear community papers continue to have an important place in the media mix of consumers, but I don't think it's all unicorns and rainbows as the release might suggest with this quote:

"The survey shows a majority of respondents believe that the newspaper does a better job of providing background and depth on stories essential to citizens,” Anfinson said. “Further, the newspaper is more useful to them personally than any other news source. It not only highlights the strong bond between local communities and their newspapers, but demonstrates that people do value good journalism."

If I'm running a business, I'm not willing to give up a quarter or a third of my market, yet I've sat in many a meeting in recent years where community publishers defiantly act as though digital is the enemy or, if they have digital assets, seem largely clueless about them. Bad move.


(Also published on the Community Journalism Interest Group blog.)

Are those news sites or ad sites? It gets ugly.

Over at the Monday Note (petty much required reading here at CSJ World every Sunday night) Frédéric Filloux has performed an interesting experiment in looking at news site Web design - mask all the ads and see how much of the site really is left devoted to news.

It's pretty eye-opening. For instance, here is the French site 20 Minutes as Filloux found it the other day.

 He blocked out the ads with red.

Fascinating. There is some squishiness in this, because when I went to the site today, the big splash page and background he found were gone and there was a more subdued feel. Still, it shows how excesses have been known to pop up.

At the Swedish paper Aftonbladet, however, the ads still reign, just as he found them. Look at the mask:

U.S. sites seem a bit more restrained, but hardly without problems. Go to his post to look at the masked screenshots and judge for yourself. Consider this gauge he put together of where the typical page for various sites actually begins with news content:

So what does that say about concern for the reader given all that we have seen in eyetrack and similar studies about readers' reluctance to scroll more than about a screen and a half before they start losing interest?

Now, the scrolling dynamic is a bit different on mobile screens, where it tends to be built more into the psyche of the screens (plus it's easier to do with the flick of a finger). But as Filloux writes:

The weird thing is this: On the one hand, web designers seem to work on increasingly large monitors; on the other, the displays used by readers tend to shrink as more people browse the web on notebooks, tablets or smartphones.

The result is a appalling when you try to isolate content directly related to the news. (His emphasis.)

There are many forces pulling at online sites, not the least of which is the need to make money. But I find it fascinating how much of the real estate has been given over to ads. It seems to be the print mindset brought to the Web (you could often find, in the "good old days," inside pages with one or two short stories and a huge ad stack). But the online audience, as we know, is not "captive," and my experience anecdotally observing people's digital use is that they are not willing to be subject to the same kinds of thinking.

Mobile could change all this significantly, if it really does generate new design principles - and Filloux discusses some of the better iPad apps that have eschewed the "print" layout and "start from a blank slate in which a basic set of rules (typefaces, general structure of a page, color codes) are adapted to the digital format."

But we also know from experience that large swaths of the news industry will take the path of least resistance, which right now seems to be simply "scaling down" the cluttered website designed for the desktop and squeezing it into a smaller screen (perhaps not even with all the elements, but still with many of them including the ads).

I think his illustrations show why that won't work.

Yelvington on tablets

Steve Yelvington has a 10-point list of things worth remembering about tablets and mobile.

Worth reading.

My favorite:

It's not just another distribution channel. We should have learned this from the Web, but many of us didn't. A mobile device is an intelligent device with storage and sensors and the full power of the Internet at its beck and call. It can do amazing things. If you don't take advantage of those amazing capabilities, you will have a sad phone, and sad users.

Merriam-Webster App

Merriam-Webster has a free Android app to access the dictionary and some other goodies like word of the day.

You will get ads, however, the price of free.

Don Norman: Why tablet and smartphone interfaces suck

OK, Norman didn't put it quite like that. The actual title of his article is Gestural Interfaces: A Step Backwards In Usability.

Don't let it throw you. As you'd expect from a usability expert, the article is highly readable. And it details why too many touch-screen interfaces suck: Buttons that don't exactly do what you think they might (or do more than you expect, like the back button that, hit once too often, takes you out of the application), mystery gestures that work in some cases but not others, ignorance of conventions such as what check boxes are supposed to do versus radio buttons, etc.

This isn't arcana. It's important stuff to think about as we enter the mobile era. Some of us are involved in design directly (not me, of course, but some of us here), while others of us have to (or at least should be) thinking about these things as we fashion content to interact with these systems.

Norman is one of the highly regarded usability researchers (partner of Jakob Nielsen).


In fact, I'd recommend taking a look at his whole jnd.org site. Some fascinating stuff about design and human-computer interaction, which I believe is too important to be left to the engineers. With the "printing press" effectively pushed to the desktop in many cases, journalists now have a dog in this hunt.

Quick interesting reads

I'm on the road, so just a quick hit. Allow me to suggest two items from today's Paid Content. Both involve the shift happening in the traditional Web as mobile and apps become more prevalent:

The first discusses how traditional publishers are turning back to more of the print-type experience online and how not only apps, but also the Safari browser's new '"reader" view are aiding and abetting that.

The second is an interesting follow-on, with Scribd suggesting those publishers might do better using robust HTML5 coding instead of sinking many dollars into multiple apps.

I touched on some of this on a recent press association panel and in this month's Common Sense Journalism column.

I am just fascinated by what I expect to be the next digital evolution, powered by mobile, apps and geolocation - a Web without websites as we know them

Facinating video of NY Times Web traffic

Nick Bilton, the N.Y. Times' technology blogger at Bits, has shared a fascinating set of videos showing traffic to the Times' Web site on the day of Michael Jackson's death.

There is the usual stuff - the ebb and flow as the day begins. And then there is the big spike shortly after 5 p.m. when word of Jackson's death surfaced (reinforcing the idea that online is more and more where people are turning for that instant info hit - the role TV used to play).

But also fascinating to me is the relative constancy of mobile throughout the day. As Bilton notes in the comments section, some of this may be an artifact of how the cell phone system tends to concentrate outgoing traffic. But still, something to think about -- as the rest of the traffic ebbs and flows, at times mobile becomes a very significant proportion.

I don't know how much of this is applicable to your local Daily Tattler's online traffic. But it would not surprise me if it portends what news orgs will be seeing more of. And I'm still not convinced that the vast majority of publishers and editors understands mobile and its impact on form, function and workflows (and, potentially, revenues).

This is one of two videos on Bilton's blog post. He also has an international one.

The New York Times site traffic, US, June 25, 2009 from Nick Bilton on Vimeo.

Geek Squad guy looks into future of tech and news

Discovered this today. Worth watching. Robert Stephens, founder of the Geek Squad, prognosticates on technology's near future.

It's from the Future of News conference in Minnesota this past November.

"It feels like the last 40 years are all coming to a head where normal people will have high speed in their pocket."

"There's really only four screens that we are planning on as the plumbers of the future to support" the mobile phone ("the main event, it is the computer; everything else is just a piece of glass that connects to a network"), the anticipated tablet computers, flat screen TVs that really are "large iPod Touches" and in-vehicle systems.

Microsoft tablet

From Gizmodo on Microsoft's Courier tablet.

Take a look at the video. If the come-to-market (if it ever does) version does even half of this, imagine the possibilities. And imagine if video, not just stills, was integrated. Blows my mind ...

White space spectrum

While the country was voting yesterday on the president, the five FCC commissioners were taking just as significant a vote in Washington -- deciding to open the "white space" between TV channels to new-generation wireless devices.

Newspapers and media organizations in general need to now understand the game has fully changed. Once these devices become available in two years or so (give or take the time for a few expected lawsuits from broadcasters and others), we will be a fully mobile networked society.

This will change the dynamics of peak times on sites, the nature of interactivity, etc. If you think digital has been disruptive so far ...

Craig Newmark - print has a future, but smaller

Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, weighs in with some thoughts on the future of newspapers and journalism in an interview with iMedia Connection's Susan Kuchinskas.

Among his predictions:

• Print survives but as more of a luxury item aimed at the ability to individually print items or sections.
• Newsrooms take on a wide range of models: ad-supported, subscription, philanthropic, pay-per-view, etc.
• The best way to form community may be to provide the platform and largely stay out of the way.
• The best tool for Internet access in the future will likely be our phones (I've said that here before several times)
  

Individualized TV? Cringley says look to 2015

For several years I have been telling news people and journalism educators who come to Newsplex that 2009 -- next February to be exact -- marks another tectonic shift in their business. When TV goes fully digital, it opens up potentially hundreds of high-speed digital channels that will turn us into a mobile-computing society.

The iPhone and its progeny are just the beginning, but any news organization without a developing mobile strategy is toast. Among other things, I expect this will flatten or otherwise significantly change the online usage curve we see at news sites where the peak happens during daytime office hours. (An example: You are driving home and suddenly get a craving for shrimp for dinner. You could flip open your mobile device and shop for the best prices and, once you got home, instead of firing up that desktop, flip open the mobile device and find a recipe. News/information organizations will find more pressure to be fast and continuous, even smaller local organizations.)

Now comes "Robert X. Cringley" of PBS's "I, Cringley" to rearrange my thinking even more by suggesting that about six years after the 2009 change, that big LCD screen you just bought will be the next epicenter of change -- and this one could put TV news types under the same kind of stress newspaper folks have been going through.

Simply put, Cringley argues that broadband capacity will grow at an exponential rate for the same basic price of $10 to $30 year: After staying for years at an average 1.5-megabit-per-second download speeds, broadband ISPs are moving to an average of 6 megabits per second in 2007-2008, 24 megabits per second in 2010-2012, and 100 megabits per second in 2014-2016.

At the same time, Cringley argues, U.S. broadcast TV technology has been pegged to the 1080p high-definition standard, and it will be difficult to change that for some time. Given the bandwidth needed to transmit a 1080p signal, combined with ever-lower costs for processors, and on the horizon is the potential for fully individualized TV:

Around 2015 is the time when the cost of sending a separate 1080p video signal to every Internet-connected viewer -- or POTENTIAL VIEWER -- will be the same as using a broadcast model and sending that signal through the air. After 2015 there will be no scaling limits, no processing limits, no decoding limits. And since individual video streams mean individual commercials with a requisite CPM (cost per thousand) bump of up to 10X, commercial television as we know it will die, replaced by consumers choosing from a menu or recommendation engine what they want to see when they want to see it. ...

Commercial stations will repurpose their bandwidth for alternate wireless services, eventually shutting down their digital transmitters completely. And PBS, which can't create a marketplace all by itself, will follow.

A fascinating bit of analysis. Agree or not, it's worth pondering. And it adds another thing to think about as we train broadcast journalists -- such as whether "broadcast" is even worth considering anymore.

Mobile strategies - are you ready

I hadn't seen this about the Readius before, but this is why I keep telling newsrooms that, combined with the massive shift in TV spectrum (opening up new mobile bands), they have got to have a mobile strategy and assume that in 10 years most of their audiences' computing devices will be mobile.

I assume companies, PR shops and advertisers will be taking notice, too. (Notice that the bottom video was taken with the Nokia N95, itself a pretty nifty little mobile device.)

http://blogs.zdnet.com/mobile-gadgeteer/?p=871

(Thanks to Rick Koza on the Newspaper Video group for the pointer.)

The 'well hole looking up' problem

What if all the words written on on the journalism and new-media blogs about how the future is digital and everything needs to be "Web first" and we need to be totally rethinking the way we write, report and present news -- well, what if it was wrong?

Yeah, I'm being provocative, and I don't totally believe that. But what if the "public," whoever that is, wasn't quite as excited about all this technological change and brave new world stuff as we are?

Hang with me a minute. I've been thinking about this a lot lately as I work with a smaller paper whose leaders are concerned about the future and want to move into the digital arena more forcefully than they are now. (I'm going to hold back the name of the paper for now, but down the road hope to do a series of posts about how things progress.)

I was there the other day, and my first question was a simple "why?" Why do you think it is so critical to rush headlong into video and interactive and rearranged workflows, etc.? Well, circulation is dropping, they said.

Yes, but wrong answer.

I could have given them 18 strategies right then and there for improving their digital presence. And every one of them could have been wrong.

The problem: They had no real idea where their subscribers were going. Were they going online? Or were they just dropping out? Maybe, in a cruel twist of logic, the most effective thing they could do would be to

*Use scarce resources to improve the paper and let digital ride for now*

What? But that goes against all we keep reading and hearing and ....

Except, if you don't know where your subscribers are going -- or where your potential audience is -- in terms of technology and information consumption, you can't make intelligent decisions.

Yeah, yeah. Spare me the "you gotta try different stuff" and "good enough is good enough." I know the mantra by heart. I preach it every day in class and at meetings around the country.

But part of the news industry's problem --and that includes all us digital soothsayers -- is that it suffers from the "looking up the well hole" syndrome. In short, it has no view of the horizon.

But instead of climbing up out of the hole and checking, too many journalists and newsrooms tend to guess (long known as editor's instinct) or assume. Yes, the national surveys show an online nation, one that supposedly gets the news more and more online. But when I get down on the ground, I don't always see it. When I talk to editors, many have no real clue what is happening to their readers, how those readers are getting their news, or even if they are getting it at all. When I talk to people in bars and malls, you'd be surprised at the number who are not switching the paper for online; they are simply switching off. Some say they might take the paper again if it were just a whole lot easier to use and got to the point with stuff they needed to run their daily lives (insert your favorite "hyperlocal" link here, but they don't always say that, either).

I was prompted to think about this once again by a recent post and a comment to a separate post.

The post was on Mindy McAdams' blog where she counseled patience and empathy for the technologically impaired among us. She began: I was recently reminded that not every person who uses a computer every day understands the instruction “Minimize that window.” I'm not sure there was as much sympathy as antipathy in the overall thread of post and comments, but whatever.

The comment was to a post by Pat Thornton in which he talked about the need "to build cool shit." Marc Mateo wrote:

But if we build cool shit, we may just have piles of cold shit.

I came to the realization after a newsroom conversation today that I have two distinct “classes” of friends: those that are “connected” and those that aren’t.

It’s the ones that aren’t that I suddenly found interesting.

They’re not some gaggle of technological luddites or anything, they are by and large normal people with normal lives… who have never heard of Twitter. They don’t blog and they don’t follow blogs either. They use computers, they have broadband connections, they find things with Google, but they go days before checking their email. They have mobile phones but they don’t send text messages. They don’t fear technology… but they don’t wallow in it either.

It is to these people that our “cool shit” can be meaningless.

And I worry. I worry because they far out number my “connected” friends. Do they know something I don’t?

I have lots of those friends, too. When you are in the middle of all hell breaking loose, it's easy to forget that your collaborators may not be following your lead quite as much as you might think.

We haven't even really begun to see some of the massive changes; when TV goes digital and all that bandwidth opens up for mobile applications, the pace of innovation in the mobile space will be dizzying. (Personally, I'm betting eventually on a Dick Tracy-type wristwatch computer, but one that projects a digital space onto another surface and can pick up your finger movements along that surface for navigation, thus providing ultra mobility but also a decent-sized viewing area.) And any media company that doesn't have someone thinking about a mobile strategy (and obviously a lot don't, based on the condition of their Web pages) is just*plain*dumb.

But it's good to remember, sometimes, that everyone isn't like us. Listen - and learn.

---
Update:
The Readership Institute adds to the discussion by asking whether time spent on site (or page views, for that matter) really capture what Web use for news sites is all about.

In our recent work with teens and young adults we heard many times that they go to news sites to get the news. That's it. They're not interested in spending time on these sites doing anything else. If that's the case (and it seems to be - wait for our report in July), newspaper sites are at a disadvantage compared to many other sites when it comes to how much time people spend on them. Shouldn't these sites be measured in terms of how well they serve their audience? How quickly people can find what they're looking for? How well they lay out issues, or provide added value to the news of the day with digests, timelines, maps, data banks, etc.? Just because you can measure time spent - across media, which is nice - doesn't mean you should, or that you only rely on that measurement. Newspaper sites are in essence trying to compete in a race that is not their own, and risk handicapping themselves by letting others define them.

Virginia Tech coverage

Ralph Hanson at West Virginia has a nice roundup of links.

He also makes the interesting observation that when he asked his students how they found out about the shootings, a third found out from someone else face to face, a third found out through cell phones (calls or text messages), and the rest from TV or the Internet. The Internet was the smallest group.

Just a good reminder that if you do not have a mobile strategy, you need one -- fast!