As GXpress goes to press, the week in the US revolves around Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old contractor to the national security agency who blew the whistle on US spying by telling everyone that the US engages in the same spying it complains about. Media, the blogosphere, Facebook and all of the modern ways in which we now communicate are abuzz with support and denunciation.
All of this, from my point of view as a newspaper industry professional, seems to be floating on a confluence of conflicting and struggling ideas, technologies, predictions and self interests.
It’s worthwhile noting that when a very large secret is about to be revealed to the world it is revealed through a newspaper. The newspapers of record, the New York Times, the Guardian and others are still trusted in a way that no other media is. This generally extends from the largest of newspapers down to the smallest papers in small towns. I’ve always been able to walk into a small paper and ask to speak to the editor and have spoken with him or her. Newspapers are generally in the centre of town and perhaps because printed newspapers and now the archive of stories that exists on every newspaper’s website have longevity, we trust their factual veracity even if we are given to arguing their editorial point of view and selective coverage choices.
It’s been an interesting week here in the US, a number of papers large (the Washington Post) and small (Southern Maryland Newspapers) have decided to put up paywalls, slowly reclaiming the notion that news is something to pay for.
Gannett, the famous publisher of USA Today purchased Belo for $2.2 billion. Initially there was a great rejoicing in the newspaper industry until the article was read closely: Gannett did not purchase any newspapers, only the broadcast organisation (the newspapers had been spun off to a similarly named organisation A H Belo).
And, I spent a few hours with a software engineer discussing how to present content and what technologies a forward-looking organisation should bet on for new products. The engineer in question has written most of very sophisticated audience engagement product aimed at our industry and is now focussing on a project outside of our industry that pays very well. He’s 21 years old.
To our way of thinking, his new application is rather simple: take energy savings data generated by power plants across the country and present the data in forms that are easily understood, pleasing to the eye and can be drilled into. His questions are the same that we have: on what device and in what form will his users be viewing this data in three years? What technologies are going to survive?
Adobe Flex is the product in which he has all of his expertise, and through which he can demand a large income, but how unwavering is Adobe’s support? HTML5 is coming on strong, but he points out, the standard isn’t anywhere near complete. Each browser manufacturer is adding specific features that require specialised coding for each platform and a support nightmare.
What will be the future of laptops? Will it all be tablets? Or will the intelligence live in a phone and the form factor become merely a redirection of the phone to screens and keyboards of various sizes and shapes – Apple is a fairly long way down the path with AirPlay. At 21, he can remember all the way back to when he was a teenager four years ago and how mobile wasn’t even on his development radar. It’s difficult for him to see the future because he has so little past to compare it against.
In our industry, we are still waiting for the generation that rode 50 years of calm waters to move on and allow our industry to change.
I’ve been approached by medium-sized software CMS vendor to speak with their target market about the target market’s purchasing plans, growth predictions and revenue predictions. These are the type of questions had been asked of target markets since the beginning of time. The answers will vary depending upon the organisation and who in the organisation I speak with.
The vendor had started a survey on their own but decided that it was best accomplished by a more neutral party, but not before a question about news production partners received an answer that it was not product suppliers who provide the infrastructure to produce the news, but distribution partners: YouTube, Yahoo, Google, Facebook. The traditional news production partners, Atex, DTI, Eidos are the equivalent of electricity and wiring running through the walls: Very important, but a given.
When my father was a child he thought in terms of vacuum tubes, I grew up thinking of integrated circuits, microprocessors, minicomputers; all things that I could touch. The 21-year-old engineer sees a sea of servers and end-user devices. He writes software that is distributed among a sea of virtual devices in an untouchable ether; he doesn’t know or care whether the servers he is writing code for are physical boxes or a virtual servers, whether they’re in Ohio or Cambodia and where that eventual end user is.
Our own JReporter product is entering distribution. Each story uploaded is geo-tagged with its location. We still find it startling to see a story that takes place in a mundane-looking office building is geo-tagged ten time zones away from us.
My point in all of this? There is slowly becoming a new normal: Geographic and physical boundaries have lost all meaning. Snowden went to Hong Kong to share his story with the newspaper in London in order for it to be broken in the US by a New York paper. The 21-year-old engineer realises that paradigm shifts happen so fast that he can remember the before, and like the 30-years-older senior manager, he cannot predict the future and has difficulty advising his client about where to place their bet.
Sanity is returning to American newspapers, which are charging for their product, and perhaps the new normal is taking a broader and less nuanced look at the bigger picture. Change is the new normal, instability is the new normal, and technologies and industry player may best be treated like the ruts in a washboard road: It is best to skip quickly over the top rather than slowly sinking into each gully.
My advice to the young engineer: No one can see the next big thing nor accurately predict the directions of technology or popular culture. Make your best guess for the next three years and then act. Change is the only thing that can be counted upon.
• Newspaper systems industry veteran John Juliano writes regularly for GXpress Magazine. Contact him at john@jjcs.com
