Comments Off// Posted in Journalism Industry by Jeremy Rue on 04.15.10.
I’ve been meaning to write a blog post about how inspired I was by Barry Parr‘s talk at our last KDMC workshop. He spoke a lot about advertising for online news publications and the problems they face with always going after national ad networks that offer ugly, flashy ads that detract from your site.
The best part is when Barry said people should stop selling ads by cost per thousand impressions, or CPM. No one clicks on ads online, and its hurting the industry to sell ads this way. If newspapers or magazines actually sold ads by the number of people who looked at and touched an ad in the physical product, they would get almost no money! Instead, Barry says, sell ads on a monthly basis or by exposure. Makes complete sense.
Although, new consumption technologies (read: mobile devices) may change people’s distaste for online advertising. Finally, some reputable companies are starting to produce beautiful attractive ads that actually enhance websites, rather than annoy users. But I’ll save that for a future blog post.
Here’s a video of Barry’s talk. It is almost an hour long; the part where Barry talks about the CPM idea is at 19 minutes in.
Comments Off// Posted in Uncategorized by Jeremy Rue on 04.14.10.
Thanks Apple for killing any hope of bringing the world of iPhone development to the masses.
In case you haven’t heard the news, Apple has some new language in its Terms Of Service that state you can only use their tools to build iPhone applications. The timing of this news is conspicuous, because Adobe just released their next version of Flash CS5, which has features whereby you can take a Flash application and turn it into a native iPhone application.
I teach Flash at the Berkeley J-School. Flash and ActionScript are much easier to learn than the programming language Apple uses — Objective-C. That language is for hard-core programmers. But Flash on the other hand is a much easier platform to build on. I had planned to teach a class where students would build an iPhone app from scratch. Now, we’ll have to see what happens with this class.
I know there are some people who think making it easier to produce iPhone apps might open a floodgate of inane apps (as if there aren’t already too many of those). But building a application with Flash would have gone through the same provisions as standard apps, and the same review process by Apple. I feel opening it up to more than just programmers presents a tremendous opportunity for smaller operations that could build applications that cater to niche markets or communities.
Comments Off// Posted in Student News by Jeremy Rue on 03.22.10.
Flash project built by David Castello-Lopes for Le Monde in France.
A student of mine, who graduated last year from the Berkeley J-School, sent me an e-mail with the latest Flash project he produced for Le Monde. It’s an interactive graphic showing the unemployment rate trends for areas of France. Now understand, this was a student with no programming experience and whose second-language was English. I’m very proud of David Castello-Lopes.
The project is in French. Here is a guide to understanding some of the basics:
“aux de chômage” = unemployment rate
“rang” = rank
“préfecture” = capital city (of a French “département”)
View the project on the Le Monde Website.
Comments Off// Posted in Journalism Industry, mobile by Jeremy Rue on 01.24.09.
Is a seven inch iPod coming to market?
David Carr of the New York Times wrote an article about how journalism doesn’t need the Web, and – in so many words – he said he thought that free news found on the Web is bad news for print publications.
As prestigious and prolific as David Carr is, I can’t help but feel like he’s another “one of those.” The curmudgeon kind, that steadfastly holds on to print – not so much for practical reasons as much as nostalgic ones.
But his latest blog post really got me thinking. He suggested – in so many words – that the news industry should build its own iTunes. He compares the way the music industry struggled with Napster and free downloads to the way the news industry struggles with free information on the Web and declining subscription rates.
Now David likes this idea entirely for different reasons than I do. He wants a way people will pay subscriptions for news. I’m wholly against that frame of mind. Why pay for news when you can get it free in so many other places? The day a news organizations charges for its content is the day I go elsewhere for that content.
But, I do use iTunes, and I do pay for music. I never thought I would, but at some point I finally succumbed. I think the reason was more for convenience than anything. When I buy a 99 cent song, I don’t feel like I’m buying music, I feel like I’m buying the convenience of being able to listen to it on my own time, and having the ease of Apple’s integrated software to get it on to my iPod. I can get music for free. It’s on the radio, Pandora, or you can stream it live from many Web sites, but it’s a hassle.
This is why I think David Carr is on to something.
According to TechCrunch and several other rumor sites, Apple (or other companies) could be working on a tablet computer. It’s been described in some articles as a 7 or 9 inch iPod. This could enable some type of business model for the news industry.
I still don’t think I would pay money to read the newspaper, but I might pay nominal amounts for convenience.
2 Comments// Posted in Journalism Industry, Storytelling by Jeremy Rue on 10.16.08.
Recently, I’ve been listening to a lot of This American Life. It’s a radio show that comes on public radio’s WBEZ Chicago. I don’t live in Chicago, or anywhere else where it broadcasts, so I listen to the podcast on my daily commute. You can listen to their podcast either from iTunes or via their Web site here: http://thislife.org (It’s so much better if you can get it on an iPod or mp3 player of some sort. No one listens to radio from a Web site)
The reason why I bring up this show, is because they have an incredibly gifted way of telling stories. They have perfected the narrative of a story unlike anything else I’ve seen. Each of their stories enraptures the mind and single-handedly turns my commute to one of experiencing a riveting feature film.
Just take this one story called Life After Death about people dealing with a death they inadvertently caused. Or for something a little less tragic, try The Break-Up. A story about what it’s like to go through the one event that most people have gone through at one time or another. The second story in that show is even more incredible. Listen to either of these, or some of the other more compelling shows on their site, and any person can see the power of storytelling.
I guess what I’ve learned from This American Life is that the narrative is not dead. We’ve just forgotten about it. With the glitz and glamor of multimedia, we often lose sight of the part that matters most; the content. And this is coming from a Flash Instructor who advocates the need for stronger design and user-interface principles in most news packages. Sure, those things are important too, but we need to think more about the narrative arc, and weaving a person through a linear story.
Now, I know what most people think when I say this — ‘we DO think about the story, it’s ALL we think about.’ But I think we become so infatuated with what the story is, we lose sight of how we tell that story.
Okay, maybe that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but to give an example, some of the best qualities of stories involve words like like “texture” that part of the story that allows me to feel through senses other than my eyes. Or how about “surprise;” giving me a sense of suspense or tension and surprising me with something I could never have expected. Or how about “dimension” or “perspective;” there is nothing better than a story that completely turns my naive perceptions and assumptions completely upside down and opens my eyes to a larger world.
These are the qualities that screen writers or novelists take a person through. Why shouldn’t they apply more to journalism? In fact, we have a distinct advantage because our stories are real. And even more so, we’re dealing with a brand new medium. One that is incredibly flexible and capable to do things storytellers could never do before. Novelists can’t get immediate feedback from their readers, and screenwriters can’t give their viewers choices about how they want to navigate a feature film. Multimedia, I believe, can tell stories unlike anyone has ever experienced. Check out The Oregonian’s Living to the End and tell me that story could have the same effect as only a print piece, a TV piece or even a radio piece. It’s everything that makes it so riveting. Seeing the comments, the photos, the stories… the whole package. And that’s just one example
The possibilities are endless.
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