Chuck's Q Blog

Elevator pitch for NewIdeasInNews.com:

Trying to decide if your news organization should charge for content? Want to know if your station should publish to a tablet computer as well as online? Which smartphone should you be on? Which social platforms are worth your time?

New Ideas In News is here to help answer those questions.

Written by a news veteran working on the digital media front lines, the new industry blog (NewIdeasInNews.com) cuts through the chatter,  allowing media executives to focus on the concepts most likely to find success.

One-sentence pitch:

New Ideas In News (NewIdeasInNews.com) provides commentary and analysis on industry trends, cutting through the chatter and allowing media executives to focus on the best new concepts in digital distribution.

Promotional email for NewIdeasInNews.com:

Niche News Site Surveys Changing Media Landscape

COLUMBUS, Ohio (July 22) — Today’s media landscape is changing quickly. The pace of the shift from print and broadcast to online and beyond is enough to make any editor’s head spin.

NewIdeasInNews.com is designed to cut through the hype of conflicting news models, providing insight and analysis on the latest ideas and trends in digital distribution.

Trying to decide if your news organization should charge for content? Want to know if your station should publish to a tablet computer as well as online? Which smartphone should you be on? Which social platforms are worth your time?

The blog, written by a news veteran who works on the front lines of digital news, cuts through the chatter, allowing media executives to focus on the best new concepts in digital distribution.

New figures last week from Amazon.com suggest that the bookseller’s customers are ready and willing to make the move to digital.

In each of the last three months, Amazon reports that sales of books for its Kindle e-reader have outpaced the sale of hardcover books, and that growth is only accelerating, according to  Mashable.com.

E-book sales topped hardcover briefly last year, but these are sustained numbers over the course of a quarter.

Some of the increase — 163 percent in the month of May and 207 percent year-to-date through May — can be attributed to a price cut for the Kindle. But that’s not the whole story since Amazon makes its e-books available through apps on other devices.

It’s no coincidence that the uptick also coincides with the launch of the iPad, which sold 3 million units in its first three months, two of which are included in Amazon’s numbers.

The shift at Amazon is “astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement.

Amazon doesn’t say how many digital books it sold during any of the periods it cites. As of early June, Apple said it had sold 5 million books and had already gained about a quarter of the digital book market.

My editor has made the comment at least once that he’s committed to “saving the newspaper industry.” It seems like a lot for one guy, but I know his intentions are sincere. He works hard to make sure the Columbus Dispatch is the best it can be and he’s succeeding in creating innovative ways to collaborate with other publications.

In a way, I want to help do the same thing through this blog. Read the rest of this entry »

I was talking to someone a few weeks ago who didn’t understand why newspapers publish their stories online for free but make people pay for the print version.

Good question. As soon as they figure out how to charge for the information online — without stifling traffic — they will. It’s a pretty fine line; one the industry is struggling with.

When most newspapers and magazines went to the Web, nearly everything there was free for the taking. Advertising was expected to support the sites — the same as in print — but since the Web gave everyone the ability to become a publisher overnight, a flood of cheap ad placement opportunities diluted the revenue stream.

Many publications attempted to charge for their websites, but even when the fees were modest, the concept was a turnoff to people who only read the paper online.  Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Mike with Dad

Our boys arrived Thursday morning, July 1, and I couldn’t be happier. Everyone came home from the hospital yesterday and we’re all doing fine, getting to know each other and establishing new routines.

As I was trying to get Benjamin to burp after a feeding yesterday, I was looking at his eyes and thinking about all the things he and his brother Michael will see. The world has changed pretty quickly in the last 10-20 years and it’s only likely to pick up speed.

They’ll grow up around books — in one form or another. We have lots of books in the house and there are already two or three Dr. Seuss books waiting for them on my iPad. Will that be the standard when they learn to read? When they start high school or college?

What will computers look like when they’re old enough to use one? Some experts already are showing that the growth of tablets is edging out demand for netbooks. PC’s — though still selling well — are a shrinking part of computer sales, especially when compared to laptops. Mobile is obviously the wave of the future.

Their entertainment options will likely be mostly digital as well. We have an iPod speaker base in their room and I’ll be setting up a lullaby playlist soon. Later, I’m sure our DVR will store lots of their favorite shows.

Like older kids today who don’t know what 45′s were and learned to tell time on a digital clock, will these guys have any use for a DVD or CD in a few years?

The answers will be determined at the crossroads of advancing technology and consumer interest.

But we may have to read The Cat in the Hat tonight on the iPad, just to start down the digital road.

A friend of mine was waiting for a flight recently and called to tell me that he was reading Wired magazine.

“And I can keep reading it when the plane takes off; they won’t make me put it away,” he said, clearly comparing his version with the first edition of Wired I’d just downloaded to the iPad.

“Sure, but can you watch a video clip from the Pixar story or get a 360-degree look at Iron Man’s suit?” I asked.

“No.”

“How about audio files? Does it play audio files?”

“No.”

“Mine does.”

“The little subscription cards probably don’t fall out of yours either, do they?”

“Nope.”

Along with the full text of the print edition, mine had more than 40 pieces of multimedia or interaction points. We paid the same price for both editions of the magazine, but I know mine was more fun to browse. Read the rest of this entry »

Ask any newspaper editor where his company went wrong online and most will say, “We should have found a way to charge for the content.”

Though I’d argue that paper’s aren’t really “giving away” their online content (there is ad support, albeit not the kind that pays when compared to print ads), the new wave of delivery platforms may offer a chance for some news organizations to hit the reset button.

Each new platform will needs to find an audience. Once that happens, it’s up to content providers to decide how to package their product for that platform and what the traffic will bear in terms of pricing.

E-readers, like the Kindle and Nook, have found an audience (though the size of that group is a question). Both established that their products — mainly books, in this case — would be cheaper to buy in this format, but not free.

With the rules of the platform established, newspapers and magazines followed publishers to the e-reader market with subscription-based products. They already knew the people who owned these devices were willing to pay for content.

A single copy of the Columbus Dispatch will set you back $1 on the newsstand. It’s also a $1 on a Sony e-reader and  75 cents on a Kindle or Nook.

The same stories are free online and it’s iPhone app is free as well. (The rules for iPhone apps aren’t hard and fast, but free seems to be winning that fight.)

But when the paper develops an iPad app, how will it approach pricing? Read the rest of this entry »

I recently decided to give Hootsuite.com a try again since I’m doing more with Twitter these days. I was just getting used to using it when they upgraded their service this week, including an interface refresh and features that now work with HTML5.

Everything worked as expected — until I attempted to add a second profile to my account so I could monitor and post tweets for work. That’s where things got a little fuzzy.

After fumbling around the new dashboard for a bit, I finally figured out how to accomplish my goal.

If you’re having a similar problem, walk through this short primer and see if it helps. Read the rest of this entry »

If your news organization hasn’t issued an iPhone app yet, you’re late to the party. You should be working on something for  Google’s mobile operating system (Android) as well.

But before you gear up for your own iPad app, you need to ask a few questions:

What can we do with an iPad app that we aren’t already doing on the website?

The answer to this question is critical. If you can’t come up with a good answer, you can stop thinking about investing any effort in an iPad app right now.

Many news organizations built apps for mobile phones because the functionality of their website was severely limited on the smaller screens.

But calling that same website up on the iPad with its 9.7-inch diagonal screen is different. In many cases, this will be enough for many news operations to take a pass on developing a new app. Plus, if their iPhone app was done well, it looks fine on the iPad, especially with the option to use it in its original size or a 2X version.

If you can’t come up with a way to use an iPad app to enhance the user experience you’re already offering on the website, you might want to rethink the project. Creating templates and sending updates via RSS probably isn’t going to provide a better user experience.

It’s also very possible that you’ll be providing less functionality in an iPad app if you’re not prepared to find substitutes for Flash video players or other widgets offered on the website. I was surprised to see this was the case with the Huffington Post’s iPad app. It was really a watered down version of the website. Read the rest of this entry »

Newspapers need a digital hero.

Last spring, I was at a journalism event and the discussion at the dinner table turned to the newly announced Kindle DX, which was due to begin shipping in a few weeks. People were excited about the DX because it offered a larger screen than the original Kindle, which might make it more suitable for presenting and reading electronic editions of a newspaper.

I was asked my opinion about it and I said that I would wait on buying a Kindle because there was a rumor that Apple was going to launch some kind of giant iPod Touch device, possibly as soon as that summer. If that were true, I said, I’d rather have something with a color screen and more capabilities than just an e-reader.

That June came and went with no announcement. But the rumors persisted and were finally confirmed in January with the announcement of the iPad.

Since its release in April, there have been a lot of side-by-side comparisons of these devices. The Kindle generally scores better when the weight of the units is concerned or the visibility of the screens are compared. But the iPad scores points for just about everything else.

While the Kindle is an excellent e-reader, is that enough to maintain its sales? Can it hold off the charge of the iPad when the low-end Apple device costs only $10 more than the DX, which is similar in size? Can the Kindle be the device the news industry needs now when it’s grayscale screen is stuck in the past and it doesn’t handle video or let users surf the Web when they’re done reading?

We know the iPad sold 2 million units in its first two months, but Amazon has never released sales numbers for the Kindle. That makes me suspect that they aren’t very impressive. After being on sale for nearly three years, it’s believed Kindle sales topped 3 million earlier this year.

On top of that, even Amazon must see the writing on the touchscreen since it has a Kindle app on the iPad and iPhone. (Oddly, one of the screenshots of the iPad app shows a color photo on one of the pages — something you can’t see on a real Kindle yet.)

The iPad option for news organizations isn’t without it’s problems, but as a potentially useful device, it begins to make the road ahead a little clearer. By rethinking and reinvigorating the tablet concept, it might pave the way for a print alternative in a way the Kindle — at least in its present form — can’t hope to achieve.