About a year ago, I and many others suggested making an iTunes for newspapers but we see now that that might not be such a great idea considering the music industry and a million other blog posts about paying for stories.

iTunes also would prohibit the type of content possible and revenue potential considering Apple would become a distributor and the interface would be locked into Apple’s design.

So without a whole lot of predictions and turning myself into a fool, I’m going to say the iPad represents another platform or perhaps a more flexible mobile platform for news content.

If news companies are able to create their own reading/viewing environments for the iPad, then I think that’s a good thing.

Will it save journalism? Pft. No. But it opens up to yet another market and business model/revenue potential.
[Read More...]

GROUP 3 PROTOTYPE

The concept

Our group identified two major problems: the disappearance of local journalism institutions and a public disconnected from journalists. So we wondered, “how might nomadic journalists work and how would community life continue to be successful?”

This idea builds on Group 2 (inadvertently), mixes Spot.Us, Innocentive.com, OhMyNews.com, uWeb/iTunes/iNews and other journalism movements: public journalism, citizen journalism, etc.
[...]

I was talking to Technology Editor Damon Darlin of The New York Times today and I briefly brought up the ideas I’ve been talking about this week in the rest of the blog. My main question was “what happens when browsers become obsolete?” He paused, raised an eyebrow and so I continued talking about uNews [...]

Absolutely right. The argument that people will go elsewhere doesn’t jive in one-newspaper towns such as Reno or even San Francisco. If the Reno Gazette-Journal or San Francisco Chronicle started charging for content readers would have absolutely nowhere else to go for local information involving courts, schools, people and business. The New York Times certainly does not cover Reno or San Francisco like readers need it to be covered. And neither do any of the alt publications in town. [...]

This is my first post to this blog, so allow me to preface it with a brief introduction. My name is Jay Balagna, I’m a 19-year-old freshman studying journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. I’m also the Assisstant News Editor for The Nevada Sagebrush. I’m originall from Denver, Colo. but I grew up in Winnemucca, Nev. But that’s enough of that. Lately, Mike Higdon has dominated this blog with arguements for the idea of charging micropayments for online news content (like iTunes for news).
While I like that an idea to save the industry I hope to enter is finally gaining speed, I fundamentally disagree with it. Don’t get me wrong, journalism needs to be fixed, it’s very broken and I am a firm believer that the status quo is NEVER the best option. That being said, I feel that journalism is a public service, and forcing people to pay for the news they consume does a grave disservice to the public sphere. [...]

So instead, news needs to find a way to create something that doesn’t only help the journalist, but helps thousands of other unpaid creative people.

uNews must be for more than news. It must be for all creative endeavours. It must be for InnoCentive.com, it must be for people who want to make money off of their own videos, images news, games, information and other content. uNews can’t actually be called “uNews.”

uNews needs to be for everyone AND news. And it has to be as fun and interesting to be a part of as all of your awesome Apple products. uNews must be a paradigm shift on how we operate on the Web. It must serve as a focusing point for all communications. Otherwise, it will fail like the other micropayment systems did.

Other systems segregated content away from the Web instead of integrating people into each other. That is the key. uNews must CENTALIZE the web instead of further DECENTRALIZING it.

But wouldn’t it be great of a news company made it? [...]

Google operates, at this point in time, as if the Web is the be-all-end-all of communication. If the Web disappeared Google would die. Consider this more carefully. Google’s entire operation is Web based. News, however, is cross-platform: TV, radio, Web, paper. If the Web died, news would survive.

That’s an important distinction. Google is not inventing new forms of communications, they are innovating current forms of communication. But sadly, news is neither inventing nor innovating. [...]

As most of you know there’s an interesting debate about using an iNews/iTunes model of journalism to in fact save journalism. A lot of the main ideaists are talking about it as a business model while Shirky is the leader in why it’s a bad idea. I posit that iNews (or uNews as I’m calling [...]