Photosynth offers a great new way to experience pictures and to tell stories. If anyone would comment on whether they are required to install the software in order to see the slideshow, I’d be much obliged.
If for some odd reason you still haven’t noticed, let me tell you that Mark Comerford is posting a great series of interviews with some of the UK’s most new-media savvy regional journalists on his blog. Go check it out — it is an incredibly useful block of information (and the rest of his blog is well worth reading too).
The series kicks off with several interviews with Alison Gow, the deputy editor (digital) for the Liverpool Daily Post and Liverpool Daily Echo. There are plans for interviews with Joanna Geary, the development editor of the Birmingham Post, and with Sarah Hartley, the head of online editorial at M.E.N Media in Manchester.
The interviews are also available for download as podcasts here.
I have grown to like the fact that I live in a country where unions are weak. In the past I have complained about not being unionised, but I have since witnessed some stuff that has made me think twice.
Too often unions fuck up the trades they are professing to want to preserve. The latest example is the newspaper industry. Here is how.
Newspapers are not doing well. Circulation is down, advertising in print is down, and online advertising is not growing as fast as it should. Many newspapers are still turning profits, but not of the size their shareholders would like to see. Barring a few bright examples, all are struggling to move online. (It turned out that it is not as simple as replicating the print copy in digital format.)
What businesses in a similar situation will try to do is cut costs. The easiest way is through job cuts. (Whether it is the best is another issue.) But simply laying off people is not an option — that is what trade unions are there to prevent. So far so good: greedy corporate sharks keen to drink the blood of overworked staff, their plans thwarted by the united power of the employees. But let’s look closer.
Instead of getting rid of the least productive, least skilled and laziest employees, giving everybody else a better chance of survival, companies find themselves forced to offer redundancy packages to whoever would take them. Often, the people who do go that road voluntarily are the newspaper’s best journalists and editors – the people who have enough confidence that they could pull it off on their own. And it does not end there. Those talented staff who remain at the company are demoralised by seeing so much talent leave and by having to continue working with people who owe their employment almost entirely to the fact they are unionised. In turn, those latter guys are adamant in their belief that unions are their saviour (which they are), so they will do anything in their power to keep the status quo. It is a vicious circle.
I am not suggesting that the companies are the good guys in this situation. They are, after all, only too happy to take the easy way of job cuts. But companies are not people. They have no feelings and they do not hurt. Unions can twist their arms as much as they want, companies will not feel anything.
Their employees do.
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Mark Comerford
Mark Comerford established Europe’s first online newspaper in 1994 when he launched the website of Sweden’s biggest daily newspaper Aftonbladet.
He initially moved to Sweden in the early 1980s to work as a welder and a shipbuilder before moving to work in the digital world.
Since then he has spread his journalism knowledge across the globe teaching people from Africa to Britain how to get the best out of the Internet and digital technologies. He is a keen advocate of the notion that journalists should not be confined by what technology can currently offer, but rather make technology work for them. (Source: The Journalism Leaders Programme.)
In a Google Talk chat session Mark answered some questions about the future of newspapers and journalists.
D Damyanov: Do you believe newspapers will become obsolete and be entirely replaced by news websites?
M Comerford: No.
DD: Why not?
MC: Lol. OK. I think we will see a number of things happening to newspapers over the next few years, and maybe even quicker. A number of them will die as paper products. A number of them will migrate totally to the web. (And the fact that every household in the country [DD: the UK] will be guaranteed access to broadband Internet will accelerate and consolidate that change.) Some of them will become bi-weekly. Then there will be a two-tier series of papers. The free ones like Metro (which will probably be one of the few to continue making money) and top-level ones that come out on Saturday and will be analytical, deep, long and expensive. These will attract top-level advertisers and will be used as both an info service for the upper-class/educated etc and as a symbol in the same way watches are: “Look at me! I am discreetly telling you I belong to the wealthy and educated and influential, but not flashy.”
DD: So you mean paper will stay because it is tangible and can be easily used as a status symbol, unlike a digital publication?
MC: Yes. And that transition will be staggered, different speeds for the transition in different economic regions depending on a huge number of factors.
DD: Such as?
MC: Take China and South Africa. Both are new markets, both have seen an increase in newspaper launches, both have rising literacy levels. There will be an increase there but the cycle — new, grow, stagnate, die — will be much faster as there will be parallel growth in digital at the same time.
DD: Where do journalists fit into this picture? What is the future of the journalist ten or twenty years from now?
MC: There is a great future for journalists as story tellers/curators. There will be a load of new initiatives in regional and local digital-based products and they will need journalists.
DD: Yet right now it seems as though the industry does not need (or cannot afford) to have as many journalists?
MC: It is the monolith media that has structural and cyclical problems, not journalism per se. Though there is a problem in the perception traditional journalists have about what they do and what they are that needs to be addressed.
DD: If you were to explain it to them in one sentence what would it be?
MC: You’re fucked.
Can I use three sentences?
DD: Please do.
MC: Journalists are story builders. Those who build their stories best and understand that a story is a social object will survive.
DD: Will there be a third sentence?
MC: A social object implies that the story is a collaborative effort.
You can follow Mark’s updates on Twitter or find him in your favourite social network (he is markmedia in all of them). His blog is a great read.
