Microsoft's vision: Ubiquitous display technology

This video released by Microsoft a few days ago, which has collected quite a few links, is worth viewing as a vision for news delivery in the future.

It shows the possibilities for very thin, very portable, color e-paper (or other display technology) touch-screen devices for use in many applications including news consumption. Watch for a glimpse of a foldable electronic newspaper.

For a full 5-minute version, with an expanded version of the e-newspaper scenario at 4:10, have a look here (scroll down to the second video.)

Of course, it’s all vaporware and some of this is stuff that definitely falls into the futureporn category. (Where’s my flying car? Where’s my personal robot and vacation on Mars?) But note that often, the future visions of 20 years ago actually fall far short of where we’ve traveled to.

Continue reading this post at Nieman Journalism Lab

Micropayments for news

PLEASE NOTE: My new blogging home is now at the Nieman Journalism Lab. I'll continue to update this site for the time being with the introductory portion of my posts, but to read the whole thing, you'll have to head over to the Nieman site!

I know. You don’t want to hear about it. Readers will not pay for news online, period. We tried that and it didn’t work. Information wants to be free. Attention, not content, is the new scarcity. Free is a business model. I’ve explained this, myself.

But the “make the reader pay” crowd just keeps sending new combatants with new fodder into the fray. The latest is Jon Austin, one of the perpetrators of The Same Rowdy Crowd, in a very long and well-informed post entitled “Fixing the Newspaper Business or ‘Do I have to Do Everything Around Here?‘” You can read it for its considerable entertainment value (and very thoughtful chain of comments), or save yourself half an hour with Paul Gillin’s summation, or Austin’s own...

Read the rest of this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.

Thanksgiving week Odds and Ends

Since it's Thanksgiving week in the U. S., a slow week for news about newspapers, I've got some odds and ends, most of them from across the pond:

Who's on Twitter? Following up on my prior musings about Twitter, here's a list of U.K. journalists using the service, courtesy of Stephen Davies of PRBlogger.com. A compilation of U.S. journo-Twitterers might be a useful tool, as well. Or at least a list of links to lists. I've only come across the Twitter directory of the enlightened newsroom of the Cedar Rapids Gazette. (Which covers local Twitter developments, as well.)
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Who's next to make the leap? The estimable U.K. columnist and blogger Roy Greenslade suggests in his Guardian column today that The Independent should exit the world of print and go 100 percent digital. The paper losing its owners about £12 million a year, sells only about 200,000 papers a day, but has more than 8 million website unique visitors a month. Their predicament sounds similar to that of the Christian Science Monitor, which last month announced its plans to go all-digital. From the column:

I imagine the O'Reillys both wondering - and not for the first time - if this media commentator has lost his marbles. But I sincerely believe their ailing newsprint paper is in danger of attracting so few readers in the coming year that the balance of those sums is likely to change for the worse. So they need to plan now for an online future and to reap the rewards of being the first major paper in the world to boldly go where no man has gone before.

That Star Trek reference could not be more apt because they are in a position to explore the final newspaper frontier, the one highlighted to an extent by none other than Rupert Murdoch in his speeches in Australia last week. [Subject of a prior post of mine.] Though he was stressing that newspapers do have a future (though I tend to think he means his own newspapers rather than other people's) he also made it clear that news brands are the future.

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A new addition to my blogroll: Utrecht (Netherlands) journalism prof Piet Bakker blogs daily at Newspaper Innovation on the subject of free newspapers around the world. The news about free print is mixed: some are shutting down (The Virginian-Pilot's Link, Czechia's 24 Hodin, the Mitteland edition of News in Switzerland), but elsewhere there are new launches (ADN in Columbia). Readership of free papers is up in the U.K, but down in Spain. In the Netherlands, some free papers are crossing the line by selling their editorial space. A free paper might be an option for some U.S. papers looking restructure themselves into online-print hybrids, so keep an eye on Bakker's blog.

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North of the border: Insights from Jonathan Kay at the National Post, urging like most of us journo-pundits that radical change is needed, on "islands of profitability" that might survive the current challenges to print journalism. His life raft is aiming for:

(1) Business-oriented media that cater to older, more affluent readers of the type who can justify the expense of long-form news consumption (in both time and money) as a work activity. Successful media in this mould will look more like the Wall Street Journal than the New York Times, more like The Financial Times than the Daily Telegraph....

(2) Premium publications that cater to the ideologically involved and intellectually upscale — i.e. the sort of well-educated, well-heeled reader who prefers to spend his scarce free time in the world of ideas. These people do have a sense of community — but it is a sense of community rooted in their political attitudes, foreign-policy interests, cultural beliefs, charitable causes and consumer interests, not their geography....-

(3) The hyperlocal. People love local news — which is why even really bad local newspapers manage to remain profitable. Simply put, people want to find out where the big potholes are, who got drunk and wrapped their car around a phone pole last night, what happened at yesterday's school-board meeting and — most of all — how the local hockey team is doing.

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I agree: Amy Gahran urges reporters to link to sources. This seems obvious if you're writing a blog, but not to newspaper reporters and publishers, which is just another indication that they are still overwhelmingly print-centered.

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Make a different wish: If you're looking for a Kindle under your holiday tree, forget it. Dan Frommer reports Amazon is sold out. Order now and you'll have one in late February, maybe. That means it might be a Kindle 2. (Previously on News After Newspapers) Amazon still won't say how many units they've sold (nor will book publishers, but one mentions a "triple digit" jump in e-book sales , but my educated guess is, More Than You Think. Among the best-sellers on Kindle, as ranked among e-books: The New York Times (number 28), The Wall Street Journal (number 36), and the Washington Post (number 158). [ADDENDUM: Just after posting this, I found via Paul Biba's TeleRead the Nieman Journalism Lab post with good evidence (a Times internal memo) that the New York Times now has 10,000 Kindle subscribers. That's about 1 percent of their entire circulation. Good news, along with the Times's rapid acquisition of a slew of Facebook friends, also mentioned in the memo.]

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Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Kindle—any promise as a news delivery tool?

Can Kindle become the iPod of news?

It's got a lot going for it, but probably not, in its present incarnation. The Kindle was introduced a little less than a year ago by Amazon. The company won't say how many units it has sold, or how many e-books have been purchased by Kindle owners, or how many newspaper subscriptions. There's plenty of content available—currently 160,000 book titles, newspapers, magazines, and blogs, according to Amazon. But what concerns us here is news: right now, there are exactly 25 newspapers available, which is not a lot. They include the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, L.A. Times, London Times, Le Monde, and Shanghai Daily, at prices ranging from $5.99 to $14.99 a month.

So, for well under the newsstand or home delivery price, you can be reading your favorite paper on an e-book reader, but the gadget will cost you $359. This is progress? Oh, you can also get your choice of a couple of dozen blogs like Huffington Post, Slashdot, Boing Boing, or The Onion for $1.99 a month, or one of 17 magazines for a $1.25 to $3.49.

Now, the trouble is, (a) no color, (b) most of this content is available for free online, wherever you can connect to the internet on your desk- or laptop. My normal morning surfing would add up to $100 or more a month, and a lot of other things I look at online are simply not reachable via Kindle.

But hold on, there's a solution. Via Feedbooks, you can create your own personalized newspaper from multiple RSS feeds. (The trouble with this is, of course, that while you can get the news mix you want, you're doing the kind of personal aggregation possible also at sites like DailyMe, for which the media creating the content get little or no revenue. But still, from a publisher's point of view, perhaps eyeballs are better than no eyeballs.)

The Kindle may well be the best-selling e-book reader around (allegedly 280,000 units sold), although there's no way to know for sure. What's next for Kindle? Several sources are rumoring an imminent 2.0 version: one with a larger, better screen, thinner body, and more streamlining in general. And Amazon also seems to be eyeing a truly logical market: e-textbooks.

A bigger user base is probably a prerequisite for more news dissemination via the Kindle, or any other e-book reader. So improvements in the Kindle's functionality features are steps in the right direction. But along with major and minor tweaks, it will take some major cost reductions to turn it into a more widely used tool for reading news.

Esquire and E-paper

If the newspaper business follows, technologically, the changes that cell phones have brought to the telephone business, or that the iPod has brought to the music business, then what we're waiting for is the iPod of news—an electronic device with all the portability and convenience of a printed newspaper, capable of receiving news and other content wirelessly and displaying it anywhere. The right gizmo could rapidly supplant the delivery of printed newspapers, the protestations of press barons notwithstanding.

That's been one of the hopes for the "electronic paper" substrate developed by the E Ink Corporation of Cambridge, MA, which grew out of the early research at the M.I.T. Media Lab I described a few days ago. It's an electronic display that differs critically from the standard backlit computer or cellphone screen, in that it has the look of paper, a finer resolution than standard screens, and is read by reflected light. This makes it easier to read and less tiring to the eye. And since it uses battery power only when the image changes, devices that use it can go much longer between recharges.

While E Ink's e-paper (they call it Electronic Paper Display or EPD) has been used in devices like Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader, its real promise may lie in the fact that it can be produced in a thin, flexible, paperlike format. Flexible EPD gets its first major test and exposure this month on the cover of Esquire magazine's 75th anniversary issue (100,000 newsstand copies only), which will have an EPD cover that will feature a dynamic display powered by an imbedded chip and battery. (A nice complete explanation of the technology is here on FolioMag.)

It's not surprising that the rollout, several years in the making (and made possible by an ad for the Ford Flex crossover SUV) is in a magazine owned by the Hearst Corporation, which is an investor in E Ink. Hearst is also a major newspaper owner, and is undoubtedly looking at the promise and the possibilities of EPD for all of its publications. In fact, Hearst has reportedly obtained a one-year exclusive contract to use EPD in its products.

The Esquire cover is likely to feature a relatively simple changing display, like the early blinking ads on web sites. But despite a bit a flak from the green community, Hearst will certainly want to take this further—for example, imagine a multi-page EPD book with the same content capabilities as the Kindle or the Sony Reader. Or to imagine your morning newspaper delivered not with a thud on your front porch, but electronically to a sheet of EPD you that can roll up, take into the loo, or to Starbucks, or along on your commute, changing the page your viewing with a simple control on the edge, and reusable indefinitely for future editions. A test of such a system was rumored in Seattle last year. Hearst denied the plan, but it has to be in the range of possibilities they are exploring with E Ink.

That's good news. While the Kindle (which seems to have gained more traction than the Sony Reader) has both detractors and admirers, it's not the "iPod of news"—yet. The potential for e-paper displays has barely been scratched. (One wonders, for example, why gas station chains still change prices via the 19th-century manual technique of flipping numeral cards on the pumps, when an e-paper display would allow them to do it from a centrally located computer at the same time they change the price locked into the pump's electronics. E Ink does have products aimed at the sign industry.)

In any event, we'll be keeping a close watch on developments in this technology. In upcoming posts, we'll visit in greater depth the news delivery potential of the Kindle and Sony Reader, as well as the European entry in this race, the Iliad reader produced by iRex Technologies, which resulted from a collaboration between E Ink and Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands.