The media's iPod moment

NYT:  Putting print on the grid is a necessity, because the grid is where America lives. But what the newspaper industry really needs is an iPod moment.

The story goes on to float the idea of a portable news reader/tablet gadget, something I've been hearing on and off for a few years.

What's far more interesting to me is what I call the "TV Week strategy." The advent of TV scared newspapers until they realised that they could make money writing about TV. Hence the birth of TV magazines, TV guides, and endless stories about TV ratings. That's all good fodder for selling paper.

So if you take a look at The New York Times' growing coverage of blogs, podcasting and Web 2.0 stuff these days, I get the feeling newspapers are applying the same technique all over again. And no, it's not a bad idea at all. It's a virtuous circle. Blogs need mainstream exposure, and newspapers serve a valuable role charting new trends & technology movements in a concise fashion.

Oh, and in case you missed it, I landed a front page story on Thursday Oct 6 covering the Google and Sun Microsystems deal. It spilled to a full page of analysis by yours truly. Plenty of commentators around the world have bagged this deal, and that's fair enough. But in some cases, it's easy to overlook a powerful trend amid all the fashionable knee-jerk reactions. Jonathan Schwartz describes it as a shift in the model for distributing software. Make no mistake, software applications are moving off the desktop and on to the web. In that regard, Microsoft faces the same legacy business issues as newspapers. And that's a big story.

And for the record: an Australian IT media site called IT Journo has one or two freelance reporters that make a habit of beating up on the journalists and the IT media that the site aims to promote (a big passion of its founder Phil Sim).

The site ran piece last week in which it decided that my Google/Sun story, and a shorter piece on the same subject in the national pages of The Australian newspaper, was actually a sign of editors scratching around for a good story (link here for IT journalist subscribers).

It's clear to me that ITJ, and the freelance journalist in question here, got it wrong again. Any IT story that makes the front page, or even national pages, of major Australian daily newspapers should be given its due. The bigger agenda at play, elements of which I've touched on above, is far more interesting than some banal, arm-chair insight.

If ITJ does not appreciate the positive impact IT stories appearing the national sections have on the future of the media, and the IT trade media business in particular, then I'd seriously question whether the writers are aligned with site's pro-IT media industry agenda.

Comments

[Simon Sharwood]

Let's start with the basics. I'm "that freelancer" and let me assure you all that there is NO agenda to beat up on journos. Self-loathing is not something I promote! Nor is biting the hand that feeds. IT journalism contributes the majority of my livelihood, so running it down would be stupid ... doubly so for a bloke with kids to feed, a mortgage to tend and a desire to visit France next year to visit the rellies!

Mark's spot on in saying that it is a huge story Microsoft is faced with an extraordinary new competitor in the form of web-hosted software, not least for everyone whose super fund owns Microsoft shares (plenty do, I reckon) given the collapse in growth of its stock. And it is great that his colleagues at the AFR recognise the epoch-making nature of the shift with front page status, plus a heap of analysis inside.

But what struck me in the two stories the original ITJ post discussed was that they leapt into discussion of the emerging world for this kind of software even though the announcement made no mention of Open Office being delivered through a browser. It took a while to explain that in the post, and it was worth taking that while to make sure it was not just a random swipe, but a journalistic explanation that used the sources to tell the story.

Well ... I would say that, wouldn't I! :-)

On a personal note (this thinking is fresh today and in no way influenced the ITJ post), I await future software delivery models with interest.

I have been around long enough to remember the Apple-promoted OpenDoc idea that we would spend $25 a pop on really great charting objects to integrate with the OS and provide charting tools to every other app. That was supposed to kill monolithic desktop suites circa 1992 or so.

By 1996 I was trying to run Corel Office as a Java applet inside Netscape 3.0. And I was reviewing software called AlphaBlox that had a tiny desktop footprint but plenty of functionality to rival Office. It was supposed to kill monolithic desktop suites, but it would have been more fun to run it on a Commodore 64 and we all know how well Corel has done over the years ... NOT!

In 2001 I read about how folks would rent Microsoft software for a few days from ASPs. A case study about someone who rented FrontPage for a week has lodged in my mind. This kind of thing was, you guessed it, supposed to kill monolithic desktop suites.

In 2003 I started playing with Open Office, intending it would take over from Office on my desktop. Earlier this year I pondered moving all my work into a Wiki or CMS to free myself from being tied to a desktop. My Office inertia was too great to make the work required worthwhile.

And guess what? Monolithic desktop suites are, circa 2005, a bigger business than ever for Microsoft.

So I'll be bloody interested to see what, if anything eventually knocks them off their perch.

[Brendon Chase]

I don't see the big reason for the dummy spit Mark. I thought ITJ's coverage was fair given the amount of speculation both the Oz and your publication put into their respective stories.

My pet peeve is when major publications don't get a grip on what the technology they write about actually does. Both the Oz and the AFR pieces got it wrong on a few counts. The JRE is not a set of programming tools, nor is the .NET platform.

Maybe I'm anal on being technically correct, but if the IT media can't report what IT is who can?

[Paul Montgomery]

With all due respect to Mark, of which a huge amount is due, the fact is that the story in the Oz (and presumably the Fin if the headline is any indication - I didn't pay to read it) suffered from some overblown language. The ITJ criticism was justified, and if anything was self-censored compared to what it could have been. The lead in the Oz story was based almost entirely on the pre-announcement buzz, not the content of the announcement. It certainly didn't amount to any castle storming, as per the Fin's headline. A cursory glance at memeorandum or any similar tech blog aggregator would have told you that the announcement was a damp squib on all accounts, certainly not worthy of a front page story.

The fault is mostly Sun's, as they deliberately subverted the deadline-shackled content providers by making a big Webcast-bloated song and dance about nothing to leech off the goodwill of Google. Some more fault lies with the commentariat, US tech bloggers mostly, who whipped up a frenzy of speculation about Google Office and other such ridiculous pipedreams of the anti-Microsoft clergy.

ITJ doesn't deserve a backlash for pointing out how little content was in the two stories. Their Media Watch Lite schtick is a wet lettuce in comparison to the real thing, understandable given how in-crowdy it is. I am sure Mark et al and the bods at the Oz will be once bitten, twice shy when the next big Web 2.0 announcement is readied, thus proving Epitome's point.

[Mark Jones]

Well I think I'm going to leave your comments about The Aus alone Paul. :)

The fact that my editors thought the story was a page 1 candidate was, in my book, pretty interesting. I certainly don't feel 'once bitten.' I wrote a piece about various blogs reaction to the news as part of a package of pieces to provide that balance.

Granted my post was a shade vitriolic for me. But I won't shy away from my opinion - and it is just one opinion - that I felt an important subtlety was overlooked.

To explain: one of the biggest things I learnt while being buried up to my neck in 'real' technology (ie product) stories at InfoWorld for three years is that in many case the hype eventually becomes reality.

For example, when we first started writing about Web services at InfoWorld in 2000/1 - before other trade mags really got on the bandwagon - there was something of a backlash among the news and test centre reporters who thought it was all hype. We were beating a dead horse, they said.

Now I'm as big a skeptic of hype as anyone else. But Mike Vizard, then EIC, was adamant that XML/Web services represented a significant trend in the evolution of integration technologies. His instincts have since been proven correct. Web services is mainstream.

People also rubbished RSS for a long time - but don't look now, it's created a content syndication revolution.

Likewise with the advent of ASPs back in the mid 1990s, as per Simon's reference above. Plenty of early vendors spruiking the ASP model (quite rightly) went out of business.

But the idea has evolved and now the hosted software business model has taken root among the industry's biggest companies (least of all Google). And so it should. Why give IBM, SAP, Oracle et al truckloads of money to tie together complicated systems that get smelly faster than the proverbial battered sav?

So back to Google and Sun. Yep, plenty of hype. But the underlying issue is interesting. Microsoft has until recent times held all the cards. This announcement was another great hook into that discussion. It's easy to say that the MS status quo will remain. I'm just considering if the alternative, under-rated idea will actually fly because history shows there are plenty of smart geeks out there changing the world.

[Paul Montgomery]

I am frustrated that the Fairfax articles you're referring to are behind that paywall, Mark. Please excuse me if I criticise you for something that you covered correctly in your columns/articles.

I understand what you're saying about identifying the pearls in the dirt, as it were. I tried to do the same at Internet World and IDM as a journo back in the day, and I'm trying to do the same in my own startup now.

However, there's a difference between writing early about an overhyped concept, and writing accurately about an overhyped concept. The first par of that Oz story was not supportable by the facts of the situation.

If your editors - being as they are hip and happenin' guys and gals who have their fingers on the pulse - want to splash Web 2.0 stuff all over the front page, it's far better to give them a story with actual substance. Go talk to Ben Barren about the search engine project he's working on, or buy a Web 2.0 conference overview off the wire (or find an Aussie who attended), or talk to the guy in NZ who's part of this new Web 2.0 Workshop thing. Not some fluff piece with which Sun was desperately trying to hoodwink the ignorant into believing they were as cool as Google.

The ITJ guys can't say that in Epitome, because they work in the industry too.

[Flacknhack]

I think Lee Gomes in The Wall Street Journal today sums it up nicely (http://online.wsj.com/public/us).

It's a subscriber site and I won't break copyright laws by posting here but enough to say that he summed up the announcement as a non-announcement quite nicely.