Kamis, 22 Desember 2011

Big data, mobile payments, and identity authentication will be big in 2012


Nieman Journalism Lab

Posted: 21 Dec 2011 04:00 PM PST
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2011 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Taking us home is Amy Webb, the head of the digital ideas and strategy agency Webbmedia Group, weighing in with predictions for the big tech trends of 2012.

Big Data


Information is everywhere, and more than any previous year in our history, 2012 will be the year of data. We're recording our daily activity with BodyMedia arm bands and syncing our biometrics with our Android phones. Hacker-journalists are converting huge datasets for use by everyday newsroom reporters. Hyper-creative data visualization teams, such as JESS3, are creating stunning charts and graphs appealing to the non-geeky set. Untold amounts of healthcare, government, personal-location, business, academic and transportation data can be mined for research as well as to generate answers about our efficiency, effectiveness and productivity. In 2012, we anticipate seeing a number of new initiatives that attempt to crack the big data nut.

OR (object recognition)

Oblong Industries recently unveiled its g-speak spatial operating environment, which was the culmination of three decades of research at MIT and uses object recognition. You may already be familiar with Oblong's work, which was featured in the film Minority Report. g-speak combines a “gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels" to meld humans with information displays. You may not buy a g-speak environment for your living room in 2012, but do expect to see OR in mobile apps and devices. High-end sensor processing, enhanced cameras and troves of databases will enable you to snap a photo and instantly glean information about the person sitting next to you on the train, the ingredients in your entree or even the designer of your friend's new shoes.

Graphic Interfaces

In 2011, we saw a number of new graphic interfaces. The New York Times debuted its "magic mirror," which uses Microsoft Kinect to recognize a users face and then becomes a morning bathroom companion. It can recommend what shirt to wear with what tie, let you search the web, check the weather, read your email and access your prescription medication information. Japanese tablet manufacturer Wacom released its Inkling, allowing graphic artists to use a special pen and receiver clip to draw on any surface. Tether the clip to a computer, and everything that was drawn can be imported into just about any image editing program. We expect to see more interactive surfaces in the coming year as well as new tools to access them.

Topics

Aggregation (even personalized aggregation) no longer solves our information overload problem. In 2010, we saw the debut of Flipboard and the reintroduction of Pulse, which are dynamic content curation apps. Now we're seeing topic-focused dynamic curation and recommendation built into apps and websites. Some of the players in this space include Scoop.it, Twylah and Storyful. At the end of 2011, Google launched a Flipboard-like topics aggregator, Currents. (It had been code-named Propeller during development.) As much as some news organizations may grumble that basic topics pages don't drive traffic or serve the user, these newer, dynamically-organized pages that include curation have been tremendously successful. Grouping people and companies together is a great way to keep information organized, and fluid topic pages that continually update help consumers make sense of all the information that's available. Expect to see a lot of dynamic topic pages — even if they're called something else — in 2012.

Privacy Concerns

We are uploading millions of photos every day to social networks, and in the process we're attaching rich data along with them: who's in the photo, where the photo was taken, even what equipment was used. Combined with social check-in services, which continually show our physical locations and who we're with, a number of clever search tools have emerged that can effortlessly divulge a person's name, age and interests simply by snapping a photo of his or her face. While sophisticated users have expressed concerns about their privacy, younger mobile and social network users are more and more willing to share everything with everyone. Facebook continues to change its terms of service often, but most users aren't aware of what personal information is being shared with the outside world. What — if anything — to do about our digital privacy will be an ongoing discussion throughout the next year.

Women

The tech world may seem largely dominated by men, but a cadre of smart, creative women have been hard at work — and often hardly-noticed — leading product development, tech innovation and startups. Groups such as TEDxWomen and advocates like Change the Ratio are working to highlight both successes and inequalities. In 2012, we expect to see more woman receive funding, speaking at conferences, interviewed by mainstream media, judging awards and getting recognition for their many contributions in tech and beyond.

Ethics Concerns and Digital Content

In 2011, there were numerous high-profile ethics questions at major tech/journalism companies. Tech blogger Michael Arrington launched a $20 million venture capital fund that would invest in many of the companies covered by his publication, TechCrunch. Microblogging platform Tumblr, which is used by many in the fashion industry, made news when it sent 16 bloggers to Fashion Week shows at their hosts' expense. Tumblr was charging brands as much as $350,000 for private events with bloggers, and in return, brands would receive guaranteed product placement within blog posts. The What's Trending web series on CBSNews.com posted a tweet that Steve Jobs had died (well in advance of his actual death), and then issued a snarky response: "Apologies — reports of Steve Job's [sic] death completely unconfirmed. Live on." As the media landscape continues to evolve, newsrooms, developers, marketing and sales departments and content producers of all stripes will need to question their activities and discuss what's appropriate and why. In 2012, will transparency be the new objectivity?

Technology Leads Revolutions

The Arab revolutions in 2011 were enabled because of Facebook, Twitter, text messaging and BlackBerry's Messenger service. The ease of use of social networks combined with the ubiquity of inexpensive mobile devices has empowered the previously disenfranchised. Due to the success of organized movements in the Middle East, more groups will use mobile phones and social networks to catalyze their own revolutions around the world in the coming year.

Co-Viewing/ Social TV Platforms

More and more people are watching television with a companion device, whether it is a mobile phone, tablet or laptop computer. In the past year, we've also see the rise of video broadcasting outside of the set-top box. A number of new services provide a platform meant to be used by traditional and new devices. Flingo, a new platform launched after two solid years of work by the Bittorrent team, allows users to "fling" content between screens. Denso is an iPhone/iPad/Android app that allows users to save video content to an account and then stream on just about any device. In 2012, we will see co-viewing experiences and platforms launch en masse, by independent developers, retailers, news organizations and political groups.

The YouTube Network

Late 2011, YouTube relaunched with not just a new look, but plans for a new business model. In this new video-centric space, YouTube will display channels that could be of interest to you individually, as well as other curated content. During the next year, expect to see YouTube offer original programming initially for the gaming and programmer community offered via the Google TV platform. Internet-connected set-top boxes and the new YouTube approach has the potential to draw away viewers from the traditional networks and over to newer forms of digital content syndication.

Elections Coverage

We are already seeing work done by major broadcasters and news organizations in preparation for the 2012 presidential campaign season. Expect to use your mobile device or laptop to fact-check debates and speeches in real time. Synch your device with live broadcasts to get additional news content from major media brands. Co-viewing experiences that integrate social networks such as Twitter and Facebook will gain widespread use.

Mobile Scanning and OCR

High-end optical character recognition software developer ABBYY shocked many in the tech community when it released a 99-cent iPhone app in 2011. Dubbed TextGrabber, it allows a user to snap a photo, extract the text and then import it into a document that can be edited, copied and even translated. Amazon already lets users take photos of products to search for them on its website, and there will be similar photo and text scanning services meant to support commerce launching in the next few months.

Context-Aware Mobile Apps

With the adoption of the Siri application, iOS 5 mobile phones (Apple only) can now compare location, interests, intentions, schedule, friends, history, likes, dislikes and more to serve content and answers to questions. Siri uses natural language processing, so that a user can simply speak into her phone: find a dinner reservation for four. In return, Siri will locate a restaurant that the user will probably like, suggest three other friends to invite based on shared calendars, and make the reservation through OpenTable. While Siri has 40 years of DARPA research and the work of several universities (Carnegie Mellon, Stanford) powering it, we do anticipate similar context-aware mobile apps coming to market in 2012.

Mobile Payments

Square, the white, square-shaped credit card swiping reader that plugs into an iPhone, is being used by thousands of small businesses and consumers. Square's Card Case service now lets a user check into a venue with her phone and then pay with a credit or debit card at an iPad-enabled Square Register. Google Wallet allows users to store credit cards and swipe their mobile devices at physical registers. And Silicon Valley startup Naratte is working on its Zoosh product, which uses a ultrasound system on ordinary mobile handsets in order to transmit payments. We expect to see more mobile payments in 2012, if not fewer leather wallets.

Digital Identity Authentication

When Google launched its new social network Plus, it made headlines for requiring users to create accounts with their real names and identities. At the time, Google argued that people behave better when they use their real names — it even went so far as to call Plus not a social network, but a digital identity service. Some are now questioning how and when Google would be using our digital identities. Outside of social media, police departments in the U.S. have started using MORIS, which snaps on to an iPhone and enables officers to scan the irises of alleged criminals. In Brazil, police offers are starting to fit glasses with biometric cameras which can scan 46,000 data points on a face and query a criminal database in real-time. Siri, an application acquired by Apple for the iPhone, can recognize individual voices and infer contextual information based on the user. In 2012, our fingerprints may not matter nearly as much as our eyes, face and usernames.
Posted: 21 Dec 2011 03:30 PM PST
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2011 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Next up is Gina Masullo Chen, who spent 20 years as a newspaper reporter and editor and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in communications at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. She blogs at savethemedia.com.
“Great entrepreneurs do not really see the future as much as the create the future they envision.”
That’s a quote from MIT professor Michael A. Cusumano from a piece he wrote on the late Steve Jobs, but I think it offers some insight for the future of journalism in 2012. I think we in the industry need to heed this advice and create a future for journalism — rather than just wait and see what happens.
If I were creating this future, a large component of it would include offering greater customization of news and information for readers. I have been quite impressed with the Zite app on the iPad, which allows me to pick from a list of topics and customize my own magazine of sorts. The device uses the topics the user selects to curate blogs and news sites across the web, creating a personalized news summary.
On my Zite, my topics include journalism (of course), social media, science, and psychology. I open my Zite, click on one of my topics, and I receive a series of summaries. I can access the whole articles with a touch. One might be from The New York Times; another from the technology blog GigaOm; another from Psychology Today. With just a touch of my finger, I can sort through a variety of topics and news venues. I can seamlessly share these on Twitter, Facebook, or Google Plus. I also can “vote” on whether I liked the article and would like to receive more like it. In essence, Zite learns what I like over time and creates a more accurately customized product for me the more I use it. In this way, it offers some of the intended benefits of the older program, StumbleUpon, but I find that it’s easier to use.
In the future of journalism that I would like to envision, a Zite-like application would exist for other types of news and information. Imagine a local Zite, where I can read my hometown paper, TV station websites, alternative weekly, and blogs from my community all with the swipe of a finger. Or consider a Zite for more national and international news, with the application curating across countries and topics. Or one that aggregates topics not traditionally considered news-y, such as scrapbooking, fishing, or gaming.
Sure, I can do all that now. I can Google newspaper sites from across the globe or access pretty much any blog I want. Plus, other applications let me sort through newspaper websites or blog directories or social media outlets. But what I envision is more than that. It enables me to better access all the web has to offer because it sorts and makes sense of the information for me, and it delivers that information right to me. It also introduces me to blogs or lesser-known sites that I might not happen upon on my own.
Now, some will worry that personalized news applications like I suggest would curtail the marketplace of ideas that is so important in a free society. I question this worry. I agree that in a perfect world, we’d all be exposed to high-quality information that offers a variety of viewpoints, including those very different from our own. However, in the real world, that’s not the case. People gravitate to media that supports their worldview, and then this information validates and reinforces this worldview. Liberals read liberal tomes; conservatives read conservative information.
Certainly, some people deviate from this, and certainly there are many shades of gray between polar ideological opposites where much cross-over of viewpoints occurs. But since the first person scanned a library shelf and picked one book over another, people have had the ability to pick which information they want. People choose what they like, what interests them, what gratifies their own needs, and what fits how they see the world.
In 2012, technology may help them make those choices more quickly and easily.
Posted: 21 Dec 2011 03:00 PM PST
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2011 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Next up is Tim Carmody, an occasional Lab contributor who writes about transformations in media and technology for Wired magazine and the Epicenter blog at Wired.com.
In consumer technology, five year cycles are really interesting. For instance, if you look at Apple, it's about five years between when Steve Jobs returns to the company and when Apple introduces Mac OS X, the iPod, and its first retail stores. You can talk about the first iMac and a few other things, but it's really in 2001 that Apple becomes the company we recognize today. That's when the company really becomes profitable again, too. (They actually lost money in 2001, can you believe it?) Then in another five years, you get the first Intel Macs and the iPhone. And another five years gets you to today.
It's not just Apple; you see the same five year pattern with Microsoft. Five years between their first GUI stuff (which isn't very good) and Windows 3/MS Office (which is), another five to Windows 95, which really takes the whole concept mainstream. In another five years, they're officially a monopoly, and then they come out with two of their best products, Windows XP and the Xbox. (Seriously, 2001 was really a banner year in tech history.) Then it's five years-plus to Vista (which shipped late) and another five to Windows 8, which is in beta now and will be shipping next year.
And you can do this with Google, you can do this with a lot of other companies, products, and subfields. Sometimes, it works so well that you feel like you're cherry-picking or inventing the pattern. But I think you can also argue that it takes about five years for a breakthrough product to mature, for companies and designers and partners to see its potential, and for users to not just be ready for a big leap forward, but to really want and demand that leap.
Why does this matter for 2012? Well, besides five years of iPhone, we're also looking at five years of Kindle. That's two five-year anniversaries that really signal the point when mobile reading became mainstream. You could also call it the five-year anniversary of the tablet as a media device, because really, that's what the Kindle is, form factor-wise. The first version of it was laid out like a janky, old-school smartphone, but you can see that incremental evolution over the last five years.
In 2012, I think we're going to see new devices that really raise the bar for reading, whether it's books or blogs or magazines or newspapers, and whether they're e-readers or tablets or smartphones. We'll almost definitely see the iPhone 5 and iPad 3 next year from Apple, and in either late 2012 or early 2013 I think we'll see the next generation of Amazon readers. We may also see a Google-branded tablet, plenty of competitive Android smartphones and most likely some very good new international e-readers from Kobo and Barnes & Noble.
It's going to be a big leap.
Now wait, you might say: Wasn't 2011 a big leap? I mean, with e-readers alone you've got a whole mess of new touchscreen E Ink devices, new tablets, and huge price drops that put the devices in sub-$100 iPod Shuffle territory.
But actually, I think the 2011 devices are a little disappointing. I mean, don't get me wrong, they're better, and they're definitely cheaper. But apart from price, they don't really change the field that much. The iPad 2 is an incremental improvement over the first iPad (ditto iPhone 4S over iPhone 4); Nook Tablet's an incremental improvement over the Color; the Kindle Fire isn't really finished yet.
With e-readers, in general, I don't think we've really figured out how touchscreen reading devices are supposed to work, how to blend what we've learned from tablets with what we've learned from e-readers. Even things like how many buttons should you have (specialized page-turn buttons and home-back-search buttons are actually really nice), or how you develop non-book software for a black-and-white screen, or how you blend text and hypertext. It's not until next year that we'll see new HTML5-based specs for EPUB 3 and Kindle Format 8 really take off, and I'm willing to make a bet that those will force gadget-makers and publishers to really rethink how they approach this space.
So it's not just my superstition about five-year-intervals. The lifecycle for both the devices and the publishing formats really suggests that next year will show us some big changes. We're not just going to say, "wow, there's a cheaper version of this other thing that I wanted." We're actually going to want new things.
If I could make an analogy, 2011 for reading devices was like the first color/video iPod. 2012 will be the iPhone year. It seems like we made big leaps forward only because we don't actually know what the real leap forward looks like yet.
Posted: 21 Dec 2011 02:00 PM PST
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2011 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Next up is Burt Herman, the founder of Hacks/Hackers and the co-founder of Storify.
Social media's essential role in serious journalism can no longer be ignored. Next year, social media journalism will finally grow up.
Journalism will be more collaborative, embracing the fundamental social nature of the Internet. The story will be shaped by people involved in the news, curated by savvy editors from diverse sources and circulated back again to the audience. This is the new real-time news cycle.
It is telling and fitting that next year's Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting will be judged for the first time based on real-time reporting. A Pulitzer Prize for tweeting was a joke just a few years ago. It's now a reality.
Take Occupy Wall Street. Even in New York, with its swarms of professional journalists, social media illuminated the protests and insured that the movement’s story was told. When police blocked media access and detained card-carrying members of the press, live-streamed videos from participants and students curating social media stepped in.
Looking at the Occupy movement itself hints at where journalism will go in its decentralized, real-time, collaborative, and curated future.

Decentralized

News will break on whatever website or format lends itself to the story, and be even more likely to happen away from news organizations' homepages. Whether via a Livestream feed, an answer to a Quora question, or an Instagram photo, the story will splinter further, evolving from a singular product into something much more dynamic and multi-dimensional.

Real-time

Audiences expect to see news at Internet speed, and have no patience for conventional journalists to wake up to this reality. News consumers should be able to learn about important issues as quickly as they can see what a friend is listening to on Spotify through Facebook's new seamless social sharing.

Collaborative

With the decline in journalism staffs, the audiences and participants involved in the news are also more involved than ever before in telling their own stories. Reporters will increasingly open their process and discuss stories as they’re developing; they’ll also be more willing to talk candidly about what they do and don't know. They will increasingly crowdsource their coverage, asking their audiences for input in their stories. And they’ll become more collaborative with fellow journalists, as well, soliciting information and sharing their work.

Curated

Bringing all these elements together will underscore the importance of curation. Journalists have always taken masses of information and condensed it into something digestible for readers, adding context and insights. More than ever, journalists will curate sources outside their newsrooms to tell their stories.
Social media journalism can do better than snark. Following the death this week of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, there were the usual social media roundups of clever one-liners and LOLcat mashups. But we need to push the boundaries of how social media can be used to report on an event that throws an entire continent into a state of uncertainty over a potentially unstable, nuclear-armed state.
The protesters occupied Wall Street to prompt a national debate on widening disparities in wealth and opportunity. It's up to the new generation of social media journalists to #Occupythenews — and to make sure society doesn't miss the stories that, diffuse and elusive though they may be, are crucial to understanding our world.
Posted: 21 Dec 2011 01:30 PM PST
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2011 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Next up is Rex Sorgatz (@fimoculous) — a media consultant, writer, and entrepreneur based in New York — who has an apocalyptic vision for the nation’s startup scene, and who really needs to work on his tan.
Let’s get this out of the way: I hate LA.
I hate LA the way that any good New Yorker hates LA, with a passion bordering on paranoid psychosis. I hate the faux culture, I hate the vapid people, I hate the unctuous politics. I hate their smug attitude toward snow, unless it involves indie movie premieres near ski slopes. I hate the things that are too cliché to even mention hating: their tans, their cars, their smog. I hate the way they turned silicon into silicone.
So we’re clear?
But I am here to preach a new sermon: LA is the Future. It pains me to say, but it’s time we all sucked up the fresh sludge spewing from the organic juice pumper. My logic? Let me start with a story….

The Past: Empire State Of Mind

I moved to New York City four years ago — just in time to catch the economic collapse, but also just in time to witness the rise of the so-called “New York Tech Startup Scene.” It seems silly to recall this, but back then, that phrase — “New York Tech Startup Scene” — literally did not exist. There was no Foursquare, no GroupMe, no Kickstarter, no General Assembly, and no TechStars. Tumblr, HuffPo, Buddy Media, and Gilt Groupe had yet to celebrate one-year birthdays. There were no Google or Facebook mega-offices. Tina Brown was busy writing books about Princess Di.
But look at you now, baby! You’re the rising star of the tech family, positioned right behind big brother Silicon Valley in creating new media enterprises. You’ve nurtured a new culture of entrepreneurialism, created thousands of jobs, and caused countless people to utter that phrase “we want to change the world” without irony.
Yet one question lingers: Why now? After all, New York was barely a blip in the first dot-com boom of the late ’90s. So what caused the scene to suddenly erupt? No one has yet written the definitive account of why exactly NYC had this surge in entrepreneurial gusto, and we lack the space to investigate it thoroughly here, but I have my own working theory: It’s the economy, stupid. Duh.
But in this case, it was, somewhat paradoxically, an economic collapse. In the recession that began in 2008, three sectors of the New York economy were hit especially hard: finance, media, and retail. It’s no coincidence that today’s most successful NYC-based startups are unique reinventions of those industries. If you scan the startup scene now, you’ll hear endless stories about people who “used to work in finance,” “hated their job in fashion,” or “will never work for a media company again.” (Okay, maybe that last one is me.) Clearly, what happened is that talented people left their jobs, but didn’t leave their industry. Instead, they built new businesses — more efficient businesses, more interesting businesses — in the industries they knew best.
This part seems obvious.

The Future: Escape To LA

You see where I’m going with this?
Let’s start here: Right now, I pay over $200 per month to have 1,600 TV channels pumped into my apartment. How many of those channels do I watch? A dozen, max.
This is clearly broken. Really broken. Stupid broken.
And we all know this has to end, somehow. And we all know it will end, somehow. But no one knows quite how. Maybe it will be fixed by Apple, maybe Hulu, maybe Netflix, maybe Google; probably, by something we haven’t even seen yet. But I think we can all agree that this broken system is going to be fixed, somehow.
And when that happens, the fallout for the LA-based television industry will be catastrophic. It will make the print media collapse of the past decade look like Legos. I predict over half of those 1,600 cable channels will disappear. Sure, they’ll try to recreate themselves on YouTube or via other online mechanisms, but that industry is already too bloated to realize that it needs to do more than shave costs by 10 percent — it needs to move an entire decimal to the left. Maybe twice.
When the collapse hits, capital will rush out of the traditional entertainment industry faster than you can say “Lehman Brothers.” And, as in New York, talented young people with industry awareness will be there to grab that capital and create new businesses. That’s when things will get interesting. Just as New York — against all odds — became the locus of traditional business being disrupted by technology, Los Angeles will erupt with creativity around the collision of technology and entertainment. New forms of content — programming that isn’t bound by 13 episodes that are 22 minutes long! — will appear overnight. The disruption will be challenging at first, but a Video Renaissance will emerge.
And as the production and distribution costs plummet (just as they have for written media), innovation will start to appear in related industries: social sharing technology, revenue models, aggregation, and distribution. Suddenly, coders in SF will consider LA as another option for employment. Crazy talk!
This will of course require more than some happy chatter and a few blog posts. And let’s not forget, this is LA we’re talking about — there will be blunders! But failure will nurture knowledge. LA will be poised for this moment because it will have the cash, the talent, and the creative culture to seize it.
It will be fun, it will be exciting. And I might even hate LA a little less.
Image of New York by Houy.in; image of LA by Kevin Stanchfield; and image of a television by USB, all used under a Creative Commons license.
Posted: 21 Dec 2011 12:00 PM PST
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2011 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Below are predictions about the business of, and platforms for, journalism, from and platforms for, journalism, from Brian Boyer, Rick Edmonds, Kevin Kelly, Joy Mayer, Alan Murray, Alan Mutter, Geneva Overholser, Howard Owens, and Sree Sreenivasan.

Brian Boyer

What will 2012 bring? Responsive websites instead of native apps, new products that ignore the desktop and address mobile and tablet, a single term that represents mobile/tablet/pocketable/sofa-friendly devices, and lots of little helicopter cameras…. And that’s just what I’m trying to do. It’s gonna be a fun year.

Rick Edmonds

I hate to be a dull guy with a dull forecast, but I do expect more of the same for newspaper organizations in 2012 and probably 2013, as well. That means continuing pressure on advertising revenues, though the secular shift to all things digital could be muted by a better economy. Newspapers’ own digital transformation is the work of many years, so I would be surprised if 2012 were a breakthrough. Certainly the paywall and bundled subscription movement will continue to gain steam. More organizations may omit a print edition or home delivery several days of the week, but not shut down altogether.
As you know, I have a continuing concern that cuts and more cuts (and there will be still more) may cripple the news core at many organizations. As Pulitzer winner Glen Frankel told John Temple in an interview several years ago, "If we don't have anything important to say and no unique journalistic contributions to make, we won't need new platforms. We won't need to exist at all — and we won't."

Kevin Kelly

Ebooks continue to mushroom, Amazon takes over paper book publishing, Google+ becomes a publishing platform with a revenue model, touch tablets languish, streaming TV begins to eclipse broadcast TV, games are tried as a vehicle for news, and the first successful Facebook-only news organization is launched.

Joy Mayer

News will increasingly be a conversation rather than a series of stories.
In 2012, the divide will grow between journalists who are intently aware of and responsive to the needs of their communities and those who continue to make decisions based on long-ago-learned fortress mentalities. I wish I could say I were optimistic about crumbling fortresses. Instead, I’ll say that I’ll be on the lookout for examples of news presented as an ongoing, topical conversation rather than a series of journalist-driven stories. In an election year, being responsive to users’ actual information needs and being a part of a community’s conversation is more crucial than ever

Alan Murray

Print and video news will continue to merge. With new technology, there’s no good reason why great reporters should limit themselves to the print medium alone. Nor is there any good reason to have TV “reporters” who don’t actually report.
The success of the iPad will force a rethinking of news websites, to make them more readable, more scannable, and less clunky.
Last year’s big theme — mobile — will continue to be a big theme this year. The best news organizations will figure out new ways to deliver content over smartphones.
The best election coverage in 2012 will be digital-first.
Sorry, Siri, but I don’t think 2012 will be the year people start talking to their newspapers/sites. Maybe next year.

Alan Mutter

Next year will be the year that the big technology companies go after local publishing and broadcasting businesses more fiercely than ever before. Most local media companies have no idea what's about to hit them – much less a plan to respond. As discussed more fully in my blog, here's what to look for in 2012 and beyond:
  • Google already has feet on the street from Portland to New York City to sell search advertising and directory listings to small and medium business (SMBs). Sales to local SMBs are absolutely the last stronghold for newspapers and Yellow Pages.
  • Amazon is well on the way to doing to local merchants and big-box stores what it already has done to bookshops. Main Street and Big Mall merchants are the primary buyers of local newspaper, radio, and television advertising. If Amazon and other digital competitors seriously disenfranchise bricks-and-mortar retailers, then local media will suffer along with them.
  • Microsoft this month grabbed a lead in the eventual disaggregation of local broadcast and cable TV audiences by adding a host of popular programming services, including Netflix and ESPN, to its Xbox network. Impressive as the new voice- and gesture-controlled Microsoft console is, the big kahuna — Apple — has yet to roar. When Apple, Google, Sony, Netflix, or someone else gets Internet-powered TV right — and someone most assuredly will — then local broadcast and cable TV audiences will shatter. And their business models will follow.
  • Facebook hasn't siphoned away many local advertising dollars. Yet. But the intoxicating ME-ness of its content it is carving heavily into the audiences of all traditional media and it is axiomatic that advertisers will follow audiences. Not a local media company in the land can compete with the breadth and granularity of the Facebook advertising platform. As younger leaders take over businesses, they will turn to Facebook — and not the local media — to find customers among their friends and the friends of their friends. By comparison, the high-priced advertising sold by most local media companies will look mighty unfriendly.

Geneva Overholser

Information in the public interest will come ever more richly and deeply from an ever widening array of sources — individuals, organizations, and institutions of all sorts. The results for the public will be uneven, with many feeling engaged and enlivened, others left out or uncertain what to believe. Communities will conclude that credible and comprehensive information on the affairs of the day is a public good that demands their support. The conversation about "the future of journalism" will be enriched by a much broader chorus, occurring in many more venues and across many more platforms.

Howard Owens

Legacy media companies will continue to try to innovate by committee, not really accomplishing much. The passive resistors in legacy companies will continue to hold back their employers’ progress. More newspapers will put their content behind paywalls. Some of these publishers will find they have new competition from online-only local news start ups.
Newspaper revenue — for newspapers of all sizes — will continue to decline, even as the economy improves.
The deal trend will falter, but the business model will evolve.
Patch won’t survive the year.
The collapse of Patch will lead to a conventional wisdom among pundits that “see, we told you, hyperlocal can’t build a sustainable business model.”
Meanwhile, the local independents will continue to soldier on, incrementally building their sustainable businesses.
The number of local independent online publishers in the US will double in 2012 (not that we have a real good count on how many actual local indie online news businesses there are now, but the industry segment will continue to grow).

Sree Sreenivasan

I am optimistic about the media scene in 2012. While there will continue to be worries about possible and actual layoffs as well as further belt-tightening at newspaper and TV outlets, there will also continue to be many new web ventures that will be launched. My boss, Nick Lemann, dean of Columbia J-school, often says that the future of journalism is “digitized and specialized,” and that will definitely become even more real in 2012. The journalists who already have the digital skills to take advantage of opportunities — or can reinvent themselves in smart ways — will be able to shine.
A final prediction: I hope I’m wrong, but I’m sure I’ll be asked, for the umpteenth time, by reporters after a big breaking news story, “Has social media finally come of age?”
Image by Michael Kappel used under a Creative Commons license.
Posted: 21 Dec 2011 11:00 AM PST
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2011 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Next up is Vadim Lavrusik, Journalist Program Manager at Facebook.
Ladies and gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the technology. We have the capability to build a sustainable journalism model. Better than it was before. Better, stronger, faster.
Okay, putting “Six Million Dollar Man” theme aside, I do believe every word of that. And here’s a small sliver of the way I think the process can be improved: curating information in a way that both puts it in proper context for consumers and amplifies the reporting of the citizenry.
For the last year, much of the focus has been on curating content from the social web and effectively contextualizing disparate pieces of information to form singular stories. This has been especially notable during breaking news events, with citizens who are participating in or observing those events contributing content about them through social media. In 2012, there will be even more emphasis not only on curating that content, but also on amplifying it through increasingly effective distribution mechanisms.
Because anyone can publish content today and report information from a breaking news event, the role journalists can play in amplifying — and verifying — that content becomes ever more important. Contributed reporting from the citizenry hasn’t replaced the work of journalists. In fact, it has made the work of journalists even more important, as there is much more verification and “making sense” of that content that needs to be done. And journalists’ role as amplifiers of information is becoming more crucial.
What does that mean? It means journalists using their skills to verify the accuracy of claims being made on social media and elsewhere, and then effectively distributing that verified information to a larger audience through their publications’ community of readers and fact-checkers on the social web.
Curation itself will continue to evolve and become more sophisticated. As the year has gone on, breaking news itself has taken on new forms beyond the typical chronological curation of a live event. In the new year, we’ll also see new curated story formats. And we’ll see new tools that allow those formats to take life.
But the mentality of content curation needs to evolve, as well. It’s still very much focused on how to find and curate the content around a news event or story, but much like the old model of content production, there is still little emphasis on making sure that the content is effectively distributed, across platforms and communities. The cycle no longer stops after a piece is written or a story is curated from the social web. The story is ever evolving, and the post-production is just as important.
Though there are plenty of journalists doing a great job at recognizing that — and though news organizations themselves are increasingly putting emphasis on content amplification — the creation of content, rather than the distribution of it, remains the primary focus of news outlets.
The coming year will see a more balanced approach. Whether it’s a written story or one curated from the citizenry using social media tools, we will see a growing emphasis placed on content amplification through distribution, and an increasing effort to ensure that the most accurate and verified information is reaching the audience that needs it. Information will, in this environment, inevitably reach the citizenry; at stake is the quality of the information that does the reaching. If content is king, distribution is queen.
Image by Hans Poldoja used under a Creative Commons license.
Posted: 21 Dec 2011 10:00 AM PST
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2011 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Next up is longtime digital journalist Steve Buttry, the director of community engagement and social media at the Journal Register Co. & Digital First Media.
We will see more newspaper-company transactions in 2012. After a few years where no one wanted to sell at the price the market had dropped to, we’ve had Journal Register Co., the Oklahoman, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and the Omaha World-Herald (am I forgetting one?) sell in the second half of 2011. I believe those sales have helped set the market value, and some people who were refusing to sell will swallow their losses and get out of the newspaper business.
In the transactions mentioned above, people with sufficient wealth appear to have bought the companies outright, taking on little or no debt. (Take the World-Herald, which was bought by the ultimate rich person, Warren Buffett, at the helm of the ultimate public company, Berkshire Hathaway.) I believe we’ll see more transactions involving publicly held companies in 2012. We may also see more creative transactions that fall short of a sale, such as the Journal Register Co./Digital First Media deal to manage MediaNews Group.
I think Google+ will add a new feature (probably more than one, but one will get all the attention) that will make more of a splash than the initial launch of G+ did.
At least one Pulitzer Prize winner (most likely Breaking News Reporting) will have used Twitter and/or Facebook significantly in its coverage and its entry, and the social media use will be cited by the judges (or their refusal to cite it will be glaring).
The winner of the 2012 presidential election will work harder on reaching voters through social media than through the professional media.
Gene Weingarten will write a disapproving column about the changing news business that is funny but dead wrong. (After last year, I had to throw in one sure thing.)
Those are third-person predictions about what other people/companies will do. This last new prediction should carry the disclaimer of obvious self-interest, since I am leading community engagement and social media efforts for the company — but I am confident that Digital First Media will continue to lead the way in transforming the digital news business.
Beyond that, I will re-offer last year’s predictions, since they largely didn’t happen in 2011 (I suppose I can claim #newnewtwitter as being partial fulfillment, though it doesn’t include the features I mentioned):
  • Twitter will make some notable upgrades, including targeting and editing of tweets, historical searching, and some innovative commercial uses.
  • A leader will emerge in location-based news, social media, and commerce.
  • We will see some major realignment of journalism and news-industry organizations. Most likely: the merger of ASNE and APME, mergers of some state press associations, mergers of at least two national press organizations, and mergers of some reporter-beat associations. One or more journalism organizations will close.
  • At least one high-profile news organization will drop its paywall.
Posted: 21 Dec 2011 08:00 AM PST
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2011 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Next up is Paul Bradshaw, the author of the Online Journalism Handbook and a visiting professor at City University London.
The problem with making predictions is that a year is too short a timescale; and five is too long. The secret, I’ve realized, is to actually talk about things you already know are going to happen, and then accept all the glory when they actually do.
Having broken the Magicians’ Circle of journalistic punditry, then, here are the developments I see shaping 2012.

1. 2012 will be the year we finally move away from the traditional homepage

Liveblogging has been taken up by the news industry more enthusiastically than perhaps any other web-native form of journalism. It’s sticky, great for SEO, and provides a simple way to turn a newsroom used to daily news cycles into a rolling news operation.
Indeed, its influence has been so great that some news organizations are seriously considering the very way they present their news — and in 2012 I think that influence will generate significant changes in how certain media organizations make that presentation.
The “stream” as an interface will move from being the preserve of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to being a serious consideration for news website homepages. We’re all 24-hour news channels now.

2. In 2012, “Collaboration Is King”

If you’re not already tired of conference speakers staging their own coronations where some aspect of journalism is crowned “king” — from content to curation and context to conversation — expect there to be another one in 2012.
I’m betting on “collaboration”: partly with users who have valuable expertise to share; but also between media organizations, strapped for cash and looking for new economies and new opportunities.

3. News organizations turn talk into action on data

In 2009 and 2010, the MPs’ expenses and Wikileaks stories helped news organizations see the potential of data journalism. In 2011, they spent plenty of time talking about it. In 2012, more of them will be ready to start doing it.
At the BBC, the College of Journalism has embarked upon a significant training program to build data journalism literacy among the corporation’s journalists, with other broadcasters making plans in the same area. The Guardian and The FT continue to set the pace for the UK newspaper industry, and the magazine industry is starting to look at the possibilities of data, too.
This slow skilling up of journalists can expect to get a fresh injection of pace with further open data developments in 2012, from the UK government’s attempt to stimulate the economy with further data releases, to the “carrot and stick” of pushing releases of data at an EU level. Any news organization that is serious about its fourth estate role is building the skills to interrogate those datasets.
Posted: 21 Dec 2011 07:00 AM PST
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2011 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Next up is Boston-based media commenter Dan Kennedy, an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University, a regular panelist on WGBH-TV’s “Beat the Press," and the author of the Media Nation blog.
Following years of retreat in the face of shrinking readership, mounting financial losses, and a rising chorus of digital visionaries telling them they're doing it all wrong, 2012 will be a year of retrenchment for newspaper publishers.
Still standing some three years after the near-implosion of the newspaper industry in 2008 and 2009, executives will point to their continued existence as proof that their situation was never as bad as it seemed, and that a few tweaks here and there will restore them to pink-cheeked, if downsized, health.
Their rallying cry will be Dean Starkman's essay in the November/December 2011 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, "Confidence Game." In the course of nearly 8,000 words, Starkman dismisses those he calls the "news gurus" (principally Clay Shirky and Jeff Jarvis), arguing they are more interested in promoting their own the-sky-is-falling agenda than in the fate of public-interest journalism. Starkman calls for the preservation of traditional journalistic institutions, which brought a memorable retort from Shirky:
Saying newspapers will provide a stable home for reporters, just as soon as we figure out how to make newspapers stable, is like saying that if we had some ham, we could have a ham sandwich, if we had some bread.
Starkman's essay is actually a nuanced, deeply intelligent meditation on the future of journalism, but it's the caricature — newspapers good, news gurus bad — that traditionalists will embrace. That is especially true with respect to the notion that online readers have been getting a free ride, and that it's time to insist that they start paying.
At The Boston Globe, for instance, several staff members have taken to tweeting "This is why we pay for journalism" whenever their paper has published something particularly noteworthy — a reference to the Globe's newly instituted paywall. Never mind that we have always paid for journalism — until recently, primarily through advertising. Never mind that NPR, some commercial broadcast outlets and a rising tide of non-profit news organizations are producing excellent journalism every day that is paid for by someone other than the end user. The unspoken message is, We hard-working journalists have been giving away our work for 15 years, and we're finally putting a stop to it.
In fact, there are reasons to hope the traditional newspaper industry might have a bit more life left in it than we thought a few years ago. The Globe and The New York Times, both owned by The New York Times Company, are pioneering the use of flexible paywalls that keep much of their content open to social networks and blogs while imposing a fee on regular readers. The Times, at least, has had some success; the Globe has not yet released any numbers. Publishers everywhere are hoping to emulate them.
The forces that have been undermining newspapers since the rise of the commercial web in the mid-1990s will come back to the fore.
Since advertising comprises an ever-shrinking share of revenues, publishers have to persuade readers to pay in the form of higher prices for print and something — anything — for online access. The alternative is to continue sliding toward oblivion. And despite some promising experiments here and there, it's still not at all clear what would replace newspapers, especially at the local level. For every community that has a high-quality non-profit news site like Voice of San Diego (currently experiencing its own problems) and the New Haven Independent, or a for-profit like The Batavian or Baristanet, there are hundreds without anything but their shrinking, debt-ridden, chain-owned local newspaper.
The great newspaper retrenchment may prove to be more than a dead-cat bounce. As the economy slowly improves, the newspaper business may well enjoy a semi-revival. But before long, the forces that have been undermining newspapers since the rise of the commercial web in the mid-1990s will come back to the fore. Some progressive newspaper executives, like John Paton of Digital First Media, are trying to figure out how to combine the best of the new and the old before it's too late. For the most part, though, you can be reasonably sure that newspaper companies will continue to cut costs, maximize profits (or minimize losses), and do their best ostrich imitations until they find themselves under siege once again.
They're standing up for traditional values — and what could be more traditional than failing to plan for the future?
Wall image via Mark Heard used under a Creative Commons license.
Posted: 21 Dec 2011 06:00 AM PST
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2011 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Next up is Emily Bell, formerly the director of digital content for Guardian News and Media and currently the director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Making predictions about journalism is a hopeless business: Jay Rosen, who is much wiser than I am, said he never does it, and I salute him for that. But like Karaoke, some of the things you end up doing during the holiday period are regrettable but fun.
What we saw in 2011 was a sudden consciousness among news organizations and individual journalists that the network, and the tools that create it, are not social media wrappers for reporting but part of the reporting process itself. The poster child for this is the inimitable Andy Carvin, with his amazingly valuable journalism conducted throughout the Arab Spring. The network sensibility will grow in newsrooms that currently don't tend to have it as part of their process — it is still seen in the vast majority of places as more of a “nice to have” rather than a “must have.” The strongest news organizations we know are those which can leverage both the real time social web and provide relevant, timely context and analysis.
While this use of distributed tools and new platforms continues at speed, I think we will also see some much-needed closer scrutiny on what this new reality means for journalism and its constant redefinition of products and services. Or at least I hope so. While a fan of a networked approach, there are important caveats. It is remarkable how much journalism is now conducted on third-party commercial websites which do not have journalism as a core purpose — Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. — and the attendant ignorance of what this means in the long term will begin to be addressed. Issues about privacy and user information, about the protection of sources, about ownership of IP, about archiving, and about how we can have a “fourth estate” in a digital world will all become vital for individual journalists and institutions to understand.
Journalists have always been very skilled at stories and projects and fairly awful at thinking about platforms. We need more engineers who want to be journalists, and we need to teach students more about the implications of publishing in a digital environment — whatever the format their journalism originally takes.
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