I’m talking at the Media 2020 conference on Tuesday. I’ll be talking about gadgets and showing off my iPad but here’s my take on the silliness around iPad being the new Christ.
The deathnote for news has been served. So some are running off to the iPad and thinking that will save them and others are looking at paywalls, again. Marc Andreessen suggests burning the boats and going web only. Let management have a viking funeral too.
Newsflash:
A touchscreen interface to your milquetoast content will not save your business.
A paywall to content that is far from unique or of value will not save your business.
Wordpress powered jaded content is still jaded content.
Has 3D saved the movie industry?
We’ve gone from storytelling to writings on parchment to printed missives to audio to audio and video to digital to multi-way interaction to a world now where something that fits in a pocket takes in data, sends out location data, takes audio, video, pictures, is manipulated by us, is shared with the world, shared and taken back into the device. Within seconds. We overshare on Facebook and generate our own news like we always have. “Any news?” we are asked. Do we respond with what we heard on the radio?
News should be getting richer and more multi-faceted every year and instead the past few decades it’s become homogenised. So yeah while starving yourself of oxegen got your rocks off for a while, it has also killed you. Ask Michael Hutchence and David Carradine.
Why are news and media trying to barely iterate on what they are doing when there are devices out there that are not iterations of a previous device but big leaps and you don’t take advantage? The iPad is then going to take what it has now and iterate on that over years. Adapt to change. It hasn’t got multitasking, a camera, USB ports, is certainly not open yet is still vastly superior to anything out there. There are already amazing applications on it. Yet bringing in a new paperboy to deliver the newspaper to the door isn’t going to save you folks, is it?
Popular Science, Coolhunting and that Alice in Wonderland interactive book have been lauded as great so far for iPad but they’re on a device that’s a fraction of one percent of the people that daily consume media. If you wait for all of them to go all iPad buying then you’ll be very broke. Innovate what you’re doing, not how you deliver.
So all these huge news organisations in Ireland, all moaning about crime and gangland bladey blah. Not one has a Google map, mapping out the places where the violence happened. Not one has done interactive timelines. A multimedia world and we’re getting black and white single layer analog content or chirping about RTÉ.ie being a threat.
All could have been iterating their way to the full multimedia experience one gets with an iPad. Nah. Here’s an RSS feed and iPhone app that puts our content in a smaller window. Fa ab.
Look at the big bad content producers online right now. Facebooks, Twitters, YouTubes and all those other places of noise and mess. Look how much Facebook will make this year compared to the New York Times. While NBC or CBS kick their ass, look at the growth rate. Look at how much Apple has made from selling content and apps. I’m doubting the future of news will come from those in news right now or the trail blazing elitists that believe they’re better than their traditional media peers cos they have a blog and better than bloggers because they have a piece of paper that certifies they can type and press record on an mp3 recorder. You’re still the system, you just wear a silly cape around the office. Look to those who caused a stir online already and have a grasp of a business model used this century, not one that worked 200 years ago. Or actually know what a business model is.
At the end of the day the reason for the failure is this: It’s your stupid content, stupid