Reading The Paper
I just read this morning’s Wall Street Journal… on the iPad.
The interface should go a long way towards the design concept for virtually any online newspaper, albeit with everyone adding their own bells and whistles, because it feels so much like… reading a newspaper.
For me, the big difference between the online and offline experience, to date, has been how the news presents itself. Having to click thru to get a taste of every small or large story creates, it seems, a different way of hierarchical thinking in the reader. (This also speaks to the aggregation arguments made yesterday.)
On today’s WSJ iPad front cover are 8 story starts, including one that is primarily an image and a brief caption. You can see how little actual content the editors think is necessary for a reader to make a choice of what to read. The longest of the starts is under 70 words.
Another great element of the iPad experience, that should inform the online experience across all platforms for media, is the speed and the full story coming up when you click thru. There are not a bunch of bells, whistles, and ads coming up on every page. Click on any one of the stories and you are looking at less than a 3 second wait for the story to appear. Virtually every story has a nice sized image, often more than one that can be browsed, including charts and graphs. Switching sections is fast and easy and available in multiple ways.
Every page has an ad, modestly placed at the bottom left, ready to pop up at will. How to do ads really is dependent on what kind of paper or magazine you have. On the GQ interface, as it would be with most Conde Nast magazines, it seems to me that the ads are part of the content. That said, I can think of no magazine better suited to the iPad than The New Yorker. Dense and content heavy, the ability to search and restructure would be magnificent. If you are in the mood for Ken Auletta, a second or third Auletta article read at a seating would be great… same with more Sedaris, more Toobin, or more on a subject, like medicine, Africa, or books and movies.
But I digress…
USA Today also has a nice interface, though it is a very different experience than the newspaper experience. It’s much more webby… not that there’s anything wrong with that.
The thing that got me writing this entry was that in reading the virtual paper, I read a story about Carl Icahn getting the unhappy end of a ruling regarding the Trump casinos in Atlantic City… which I would not likely have run into otherwise and which does mean something in FilmLand because of his involvement in Lionsgate. I also read a great front page story on a Black Panther who has been living in exile in Tanzania for 40 years, fleeing the US on a gun charge. Besides being a great story to make a small movie about, the story also closes by making reference to Roman Polanski and his fugitive status. Thus, the question, is Pete O’Neal more, less, or equally worthy of pursuit by American law enforcement?
If I wasn’t reading “a paper,” I would not likely be thinking about either story at all.
It’s not The Web vs Print. There is a different way of consuming information. And I think everyone reading understands that intuitively. But I’m not sure we consider it often enough.
When discussing the iPad as a “game changer,” this is a real consideration. It may be that the tool itself, the iPad, is not The Tool. But it could be a major influencer in how we experience media on the web in the future.
In either case, I am better informed this morning because of the iPad. It did nothing I couldn’t do on any other computing tool. But the imagination of the designers and editors at WSJ were served by the chance to consider a new form and I was well served by them.
Yeah, but you can’t put an iPad under the cat litter to contain overspill…
Well, you CAN… but…
do you find it difficult to brush your teeth with steve jobs dick in your mouth?
cut the price in half and you may have something.
but how much are publishers going to spend making ipad exclusive content?
it’s niche dave. a niche market, a niche device.
i remember when steve jobs said the first time he saw it, that the segway would revolutionize how we travel. that cities would be built up around the concept.
how’s that going?
im glad you enjoyed reading the wall street journal on your ipad. good for you. ill be steve jobs and rupert murdoch are thrilled.
I, for one, welcome our new iPad overlords and wish to remind them that I can be useful in rounding up others to to toil in their underground silicon mines.
I imagine it’s also difficult to wrap fish in an iPad…
I kinda want to make fun of you, Anghus, but your rage is a little scary… in a pathetic, slightly scary, restraining order kinda way.
I get it. You don’t like it. It’s too expensive.
Is all progress supposed to stop because the Segway didn’t take off?
We are shifting, quickly now, from a “load a program with a CD and have every tool for that application eat lots of space on your giant hard drive” world to an a la carte, download what you need when you need it world.
We are shifting from pages full of links to stories on websites to functionality that feels more like participation, reflecting both the future and the past.
Have you even considered the possibilities of a tool like this? Seriously considered them? Of course it can be better. Or course it will be cheaper (get your iPhone for $200 now).
But the way we consume information will be changed by the niche machine because the people who offer than information are slowly, then more quickly, adapting to the potential of it.
And back to my little needs… I have to say… I can read, say, the London papers on line now. But would I be thrilled to spend a couple hundred dollars a year to have a world of newspapers available to me in a format that FEELS like there are sitting on my coffee table, available at my whim, easy to pick up and browse, allowing me to engage each city like a local and not like someone hunting and pecking through a website?
Do I want to be able to stream movies from France and Russia as easily as I do the ones from Hollywood?
Now that I timeshift my TV watching, wouldn’t I like that experience to travel with me?
We all have a limited amount of mental and emotional space to consume stuff. And after a while, small challenges to doing so tend to put us all off of trying to be more expansive.
These are the small steps that change our lives.
No question, I would still be fine calling someone on a rotary phone… using a tyepwriter… changing the channels by hand. And speaking to your semi-point, most copy machines are no longer Xerox, a lot of tissues are not Kleenex, and very few people actually Tivo anything. But that doesn’t make these all niche tools.
Also, it you can’t use an iPad to wash your windows…
The Segway changed the lives of mall cops.
Until this year, I absolutely doubted that I’d ever think a phone could adequately perform as my music player/recorder, my email device, my GPS, my camera, my video viewer/downloader, etc., etc…but it has. I remember five years ago such a device was cool, but ultimately pointless. Now, it’s a godsend.
And for the record, I do NOT have an iPhone…I have an Android-based HTC.
I wouldn’t recommend putting an iPad over your head during Over At the Frankenstein Place at Rocky Horror either…
It makes an excellent flat writing surface for my pen and paper though.
It’s also a nice solid surface for say reading a book or doing the New York Times crossword in pen on your lap.
Will try not to get too rambly here… this morning I was reading another one of the endless stream of half-assed, ignorant, pie in the sky articles about the future of content distribution business models written by someone with little understanding of how distribution businesses work — the journalistic equivalent of the fat drunk sitting in his armchair yelling “throw the ball!” at the game on TV. I despaired. Then I came here and, as usual, found a voice of reason.
The way I read it, this piece isn’t about the iPad or newspapers so much as it is about content distributors/curators adapting, utilizing new technology to support and evolve existing business models and consumer habits. Nobody is reinventing the wheel, scrapping the old entirely, but taking the best of the old combined with the possibilities of the new, trying to expand their scope of content delivery in a way that makes sense for the consumer and is compatible with & complimentary to existing business models.
For people in the content business, the future is about being better, more engaged curators & shifting focus beyond the mechanics of physical distribution & marketing. We need to be more engaged with the end-user experience. It’s about addressing the consumer’s very real need for service providers who make it easier to navigate the near-infinite daily avalanche of content, while still allowing for the element of surprise. If the ipad can be a stepping stone towards a content universe & user interfaces that foster better curators instead of just mechanical a la carte delivery, then yes, it will definitely be a game changer…
“I kinda want to make fun of you, Anghus, but your rage is a little scary… in a pathetic, slightly scary, restraining order kinda way.”
don’t flatter yourself sweetheart. i find this statement amusing since you were threatening me with physical violence in the spiderman post.
and i understand the rage. you don’t have anyone inside sony anymore. sony gives all their stories to finke. you basically freak out about this all the time. your anger towards finke and her ‘exclusives’. it sucks when a source runs dry, but i don’t see how any of this is my fault.
so you can call me pathetic, stalkerish, whatever. you can claim how full of ‘rage’ i am. hardly the case. just because i enjoy giving you shit every so often doesn’t make me anything other than a prick.
“just because i enjoy giving you shit every so often doesn’t make me anything other than a prick.”
Well now Anghus that is where you are wrong and you should apologize to the class for thinking otherwise. Didn’t Mom and Dad tell you that getting a kick out of giving someone shit just for the sake of it, well child, you’re just wasting your energy and channeling it back into your own sorry rage?
Learn to be productive.
Now go sit in the corner and suck your thumb until you have learned the lesson. Then maybe the other kids won’t think you’re such a prick.
Yeah. Sad.
“what the other kids think.” is not a compass i travel by.
the reason i feel like poking heat in the ear is because for eons he has railed against finke, railed against entertainment reporters and their personal studio connections. he talks shit about other websites and their so-called ‘exclusives’ and how they are fed to them from their studio lap dogs.
sometimes it feels disingenuous when you know that dave has these same people feeding him information. then when those people are no longer there and the pipeline of information shifts to finke.
so my assertion is that dave would be putting a more positive spin on the spiderman story if his friend was still in charge of marketing at Sony.
at this moment, i still have no idea why this is such an absurd concept.
it’s an interesting story. it fascinates me because of the backroom politics of entertainment journalism. it plays to personal bias in reporting. and i don’t think it’s that big of a stretch to think if dave’s sony pipeline still existed he wouldn’t have said he didn’t give a flying fuck who was playing spiderman.
could i be wrong? sure.
do i think i’m wrong? nope.
so i should apologize for pointing out that you had a personal friendship with someone in the industry at a high level that was feeding you information. now that information goes to finke.
is any of that wrong?
you keep saying “you don’t know me, you don’t know val”
no, i don’t. what’s to know?
do you write about the film industry?
was she head of worldwide marketing at sony?
do you give finke shit about being fed information from studios?
does sony feed information to finke now instead of you?
could that possibly explain why you’re so ambivalent about spiderman, a sony owned property?
2 + 2 doesn’t always equal 4, but it seems pretty easy to do the math on this one.
my fascination with this isn’t with you dave. it’s with the topic of entertainment journalism. if anyone read my posts in the past they can see how often i discuss the topic of the decline of journalistic ethics, or lack thereof.
so you can shove your ‘sad”s in a sack. my ‘rage’, my ‘creepiness’. you’re going karl rove on me. attack someone asking the questions rather than address the issue at hand.
if you’d like to have an honest discussion about the nature of personal relationships in entertainment journalism, i’m sure it’d be fascinating.
if not, i can continue to bring up the issue when it comes up and you can call be an insane donkey fucker.
take your shots, my friends.
EDIT – Dave banned me from posting, so i used a facebook login. i won’t post again, because i don’t believe in this kind of censorship. banning comments is the lowest form of censorship.
i bid thee, adieu
There is a good documentary about Pete O’Neal, the Black Panther living in exile in Tanzania. http://www.apantherinafrica.com/
“No question, I would still be fine calling someone on a rotary phone… using a tyepwriter… changing the channels by hand.”
I call BS on this. A month ago I knocked my TV remote into my glass of apple juice, and was without one for several weeks. It was absolutely NOT FINE, and I do not wish it on anyone. So I’m certainly not buying that assertion coming from a early-adopting gadget geek (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Viva technology.
And unless you had to erase a really troublesome post from anghus that I didn’t see, I find your inconsistency in this area a little disconcerting.
Oh poor baby mystery. Can’t stand not receiving those signals to your brain? It’s quite liberating.
In related news, has anyone seen Alice in Wonderland (the book) for the iPad? Awesome.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gew68Qj5kxw&feature=player_embedded#at=32
Anghus… you claim to want to have “an honest discussion about the nature of personal relationships in entertainment journalism,” but you’re the only person being dishonest.
You connect dots without actually knowledge… pretty much exactly what I get angry about when it comes to journalism. If you don’t know what the dots you are connecting mean – and in this case, have given up on taking the very easily followed history of Sony, Finke, etc into account – then you can come up with all kinds of false notions.
This is the same baseless kind of “math” that claimed Roger Ebert was in Disney’s pocket because his show was syndicated by BVTV. I can completely understand the notion… but if you want to make that accusation, you have the responsibility to show some kind of pattern or you are just being a scumbag smear artist.
For the record, in the case of Roger, I did the research at one point when the LA Times was trying to make it into a story for the second time and called. And I found no bias, aside from Roger’s love of quality animation… which also meant lots of love for DreamWorks and others.
But not only are you wrong, you have been a nasty little fuck about trying to use bad conjecture to control conversations that are waaaay off point.
My pipeline at Sony is fine, thanks. I had the shutdown of the Raimi film weeks before Nikki and was lied to directly by the studio and respected that lie. Happens. I also had the most accurate reporting on the Moneyball story. All of this happened after Val was out the door. And for the record, both Nikki and I sat on the news that Val was out out of a respect for her privacy… and given that she picked her successor and then co-presidented with him for a couple of years, not a big news story.
Unlike you, I actually know how Nikki operates and how and why Sony feeds her what they feed her. Unlike you, I can pin down 90% of what runs under Nikki’s byline to the person or persons who used her to push it out. This isn’t brain surgery. It is a very small town filled with very simple motives most of the time. But if you aren’t in the game, you have no way of knowing. It’s not that you are stupid… you just aren’t in any position to know.
Maybe you are mostly lying to yourself, Anghus. I’m sure there is some area in which you are massively more experienced and skilled than I. But not here. You show no signs of being interested in a real conversation. Quite the opposite. Like so many people who post comments on blogs, you exhibit the need to dominate the room… or more importantly, your host… and fuck being civil, much less respectful.
And that is why you are the third person in the history of this blog to be banned.
Let me be clear with everyone who gives a shit. My trigger is really simple. When I get the, “I’m going to keep attacking because DP is my bitch” thing, that is when I click “ban.” I have a pretty high tolerance. Some would say too high. Jack Walsh has not been banned.
But when Lex did his “David’s going to have to ban me or I am going to keep screaming about VAG in a drunken funk in multiple posts after 2a,” he was banned. (Lex remains the only person to have more than a single comment or two removed from the site in its history.) IO’s “David needs to know that this is my world and he’s just following my lead” line (paraphrased) was enough for me, thanks.
And as far as Anghus, his insistence on repeating something that I not only have addressed repeatedly, but that cannot be substantiated in any way, and dragging a friend of mine into it in a really nasty for no good reason other than the fact he knows the person is my friend… sorry… done with that. There are plenty of people in here whose opinions I don’t care for, agree with, or am regularly attacked by. Fine.
My line is simple. You can come into my house. You can call it ugly. You can clean out my refrigerator. You can watch what you like on my TV and I won’t grab the remote out of your hand. I can even live with your bad aim around my toilet. But when you tell me it’s your house and I can fuck off… sorry, time to go.
I have never wanted to ban anyone, on principle. But fewer than one person banned for each year online with this blog? I can live with that.
I haven’t pulled a single one of your posts, Anghus. There is no censorship. I’m just not welcoming you into my house anymore. I don’t care if you hate my couch, but I just won’t have you pissing on it for sport and trying to rub my nose in it. Sorry.
In a couple of weeks, I’m sure I will “unban” you and you can do what you like again. You have contributed smartly in the past and I would be happy for you to do so in the future. And if you want to challenge me, that’s fine too.
But if you want to claim to know how I am working, you better bring your A-game. Believe me, I bring it with Nikki and every other journalist I write about negatively. I am not shooting blindly, hoping to hit a target. I know Nikki’s studio and agency relationships like I once knew Jeff Wells’ like I once knew Harry Knowles’. I can deconstruct what I read in the LAT and NYT with ease… because I know how all of it works… because I have been in this shit for over a decade.
I run an open shop here. Not much mystery. I answer attacks, which senior colleagues have always told me not to do. But I believe in showing people that kind of respect, even when I respond harshly. But sometimes, my respectfulness is mistaken for weakness. I can deal with that. But now and again, I need to kick someone out. I consider that weak. But life is about the grays, right?
Buh-bye for now.
I worry about this device helping Apple to bring back pan and scan. The advent of DVD and popular access to widescreen televisions finally won the battle to get people watching movies in the correct aspect ratio. I’d be interested to know if the downloads that come with Ipad (ie Public Enemies and 2012) are in the correct ratio. I’m guessing not. Both those movies DEMAND 2.35:1 (yep, even a cheeseball flick like 2012 passes muster – the eruption in Yellowstone is thrilling in 2.35:1 but cluttered when viewed square).I fear the day will come (if it hasn’t already) where directors are told to prejudice the choices they make in terms of composition and design towards making them being easily viewable on a tiny portable device.
So….how many names does IOAnghus have now, anyway?
IO and Anghus are definitely different people. Anghus could actually spell and punctuate.
The spelling and punctuation does make me question the assumption. But the writing style, constantly calling Dave “Heat” and the pure, distilled vitriol have me wondering if the kid didn’t just learn to use spell check.
You can fake good spelling with spellcheck, but there’s no cure for the wild incoherence and mood swings that were IO’s trademark.