fix journalism a conversation about journalism’s future

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.
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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 [...]

I’m responding to a fellow young blogger who listed the Top 10 reasons why publications should not charge readers in micropayments. The basic tenents are: Nothing beats free. This completely compromises the link economy. It’s very 2000. It’s uncreative. It’s failed in the past. Micropayments puts open-source journalism years behind. It’s never been done before. [...]

David Carr of The New York Times is either an asshole or genius. He discusses the idea of making an iTunes for distributing news and information (click here for Michael Hogan’s take). Wow, it’s about time. [...]