Fallows does a nice job of parsing through the possibilities for the future, which include not only revenue models but also interesting changes to the way content is presented to make quality news a more attractive digital product. In short, we have nothing to worry about in the long run because very smart people are working on this.

If the article has a weakness I don’t think this represents the profound shift in culture that Fallows does. For years now, interested parties have been saying  that even if the busniness model of professional journalism is broken, it will be fixed because the public demands to be informed.

On the other hand, I do like the idea that the culture of innovation in Silicon Valley is coming to the journalistic enterprise. This has been said before, but never quite so eloquently and clearly as by Fallows. And it makes sense. That’s why we need journalists after all.

48 Hour Magazine is awesome project, which I didn’t participate in. I should have and will next time. So should you. It’s available for purchase now.

OK people: No more excuses. No more “I’ve got this great idea, I wish I could make the world see!” It’s simple, crowdsource your funding with Kickstarter.  Strangers (or legions of inter-friends and tweeples) put up cash in an “all-or-nothing” funding model. If you don’t raise all the cash, you don’t get any. It seems like it’s a little too much to ask right? People funding your projects because they believe?

Well it works and awesome projects like 8-Bit Cities are cropping up. As of this writing they’ve exceeded their funding goal with 27 days to go.

But I have to say, we’re all a bunch of suckers. Google wanted to get us all sharing, and that’s exactly what we did. So here it is my over-sharing friends. “How I disabled Google Buzz and shared the experience with everyone I knew.”

Step 1: Navigate to my Google Profile and select the option to delete everything.


Step 2: Confirm that I did not change my mind in the last two seconds.

Step 3: Send an update to all my Twitter followers informing them that I turned off Buzz because I don’t need everyone knowing everything about me. Christ.

Step 4: Update my Google Chat status to inform all of my contacts that I’m not dead. I merely turned off Buzz. If they are still using it, they should feel stupid.


Step 5: write a blog post about how I turned off Google Buzz.

Why? Yes, comics fans might be seen as a niche market. People like me still buy vinyl records after all. But if you can convince a comic book reader that they should pay $1.99 to ride along with Tony Stark on a screen, you’ll be able to convince people to buy Tom Wolfe, Esquire or anything else. The problem involves not only developing the proper hardware device, which Apple may have just done, but also an interactive format that sucks you in like a bound comic.

At this point in the old Tablet-as-Savior hardware discussion I’m dwelling on the obvious so let’s take a look at what’s available for Superhereo geekery on-the-go.

The fiends at Panelfly are way ahead of the curve on this one. They’ve been building up relationships with publishers with what they think can be a viable model for mobile adventure reading. Partners include several top-shelf publishers including the Disney-owned giant Marvel Comics. Panelfly currently distributes high-quality comics via an iPhone application with a built-in store– and if Panelfly’s “leaked” screen shots are any indication, their model scales up nicely to the iPad.

Stepping the platform up to the iPad is a major improvement because even though Panelfly comics look great on the iPhone, navigating the pages can be a major pain in the ass on such a tiny screen (see below). My main issue with Panelfly, as with all of the available options for mobile comics, is that purchases are tethered to Panelfly. Even though I “buy” comics from them, I don’t really own them. I just own the right to view them on Panelfly. As Apple learned a long time ago with music, tethering purchases is a major mental-impediment to consumer activity in certain areas of traditional consumption. People want to “own” their MP3′s much like comic readers will likely want the option of porting their purchases around from one platform to another. While Panelfly’s locked, DRM-like ownership model will make publishers confident that their entire catalogs won’t suddenly end up on bittorrent, I think it may also stifle people’s desire to invest in a significant collection.

Here’s a few shots from Storeyville on Panelfly for the iPhone.

The well-seated independent publisher Dark Horse Comics is trying a different approach to mobile distribution. I read the entirety of the excellent Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite on my phone and it was an engrossing experience. I read the whole thing one night in a crowded bar and barely got distracted.

Instead of using a central application or service to distribute their comics, Dark Horse is going through the labor intensive process of scaling each panel to fit the iPhone’s landscape view and packaging each issue as a standalone application. The upside is that the reading experience of Dark Horse’s apps is tailored for ease. Reading the comic is a linear, effort-free experience with no resizing, no and no bells and whistles.  The downside is that an individual, standalone applications makes managing a comic book reader’s collection cumbersome. If you see comics as something you want to come back to in the future, this could be problematic. I could always back the comics on my computer to clear up my phone (or tablet) and then reload them when I feel like it, but this seems like too many steps to really be realistic as a long term investment.

Of course, lost  longevity is almost an assumption when it comes to downloading music, apps, or books. You sacrifice the perceived perpetuity of physical objects for ephemeral bits because it’s more convenient. The challenge lies in making the ownership of bits as satisfying as the real thing. But I guess in some markets, the real thing stopped selling well long ago. Maybe it won’t matter at all.

I’ll also admit that I’m the first to gush uncontrollably when I hear about big magazine companies and newspapers developing interactive reading formats for the iPad. I think there is a huge potential source of revenue there, but I also know that this doesn’t go very far towards solving the day to day problem of getting the local news reported. The beneficiaries of the iPad will be Conde Nast and the New York Times. What about the struggling SacBee, which does some of the best reporting on California state politics? If it goes under you lose the top watchdog over the government running the world’s fifth biggest economy.

Which brings me to a book near the top of my to-read list. The Death and Life of American Journalism by Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols is out now from Nation Books. Over the last year, the authors have written a few sobering cover stories on the subject for The Nation ultimately arguing that the only way to save journalism as we know it is through government subsidies. Despite the  knee jerk reaction most people have about this solution, McChensey and Nichols point out that it’s a solution with historical precedent.  In the early republic, the government considered the voice of the fourth estate so important that they funded it as a top budget priority. According to their research it was funded at modern day equivalent of about $30 Billion a year. Yikes.

Will the government and the people be willing to pay this much? It’s hard to say.

While I’m on the topic, I’d like to point out one of the more salient points from McChensey and Nichols’ book excerpt in The Nation because I think it does a nice job of dispensing with one of the central myths about democratized media:

The main source of great journalism is compensated human labor, and as the saying goes, you get what you pay for. We’re long time advocates of citizen journalism and the blogogsphere, but our experience tells us that volunteer labor is insufficient to meet America’s journalism needs. The digital revolution has the capacity to democratize and improve journalism, but only if there is a foundation of newsrooms all of which will be digital and have digital components with adequately paid staff who interact with and provide material for the blogosphere.

The dangers of failing to see that the volunteer contributions touted by citizen-based models of journalism like The Huffington Post is apparent in “The Story Behind the Story” by veteran reporter Mark Bowden, which appeared in the October 2009 issue of The Atlantic. Bowden traces the origins of the “wise latina” attacks levied against Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomyor last spring after her nomination was announced by President Obama. “[The Reporting] was not the work of journalists, but of political hit men.” These hit men, of course, were citizen journalists who’d done the hard work of sifting through hundreds of hours of speeches to find the political weaknesses of an otherwise moderate and qualified judge. Did these citizens have the right to do this? Of course. But professional journalists should have seen this information as the irrelevant propoganda that it was. Bowden moves quickly to polemics similar to those of Nichols and McChensey:

…those giant presses and barrels of ink and fleets of delivery trucks were never what made newspapers invaluable. What gave newspapers their value was the mission and promise of journalism⎯the hope that someone was getting paid to wade into the daily tide of manure, sort through its deliberate lies and cunning half-truths, and tell a story straight.

Citizen journalists work for free, and as such, their only payoff is advancing the largely biased reasons that made citizens want to be journalists in the first place. Bowden concludes, “Unless someone quickly finds a way to make disinterested reporting pay, to compensate the modern equivalent of the ink-stained wretch… the web may yet bury [the profession].”

Esquire launched their monthly iPhone App. I have to say, it’s real slick. Too bad I just spent a whole eight buckaroos to subscribe for 14 issues. I wonder if they’ll offer the app to subscribers in some sort of packaged way (i.e. get the digital subscription and the print for x amount), because I’m not going to want to pay $2.99 a month for the privilege of squinting at my phone when I can get the mag in print for about 50 cents and issue.

Anyways, kudos to Hearst corp for doing something forward thinking.

I have to say I’m a little peeved at Current. For a news organization that is supposedly a groundbreaking alternative to the MSM, Current has been remarkably silent on the detainment, trial, conviction and sentencing of journalists Euna Lee, Laura Ling.  Although Current chief Al Gore is reportedly in the running to head up the negotiations. The two Current journalists were reporting in North Korea at the time of their detainment and are essentially being held as bargaining chips by the North Korean government. I mean, even the flaccid San Francisco Chronicle weighed in on this one. Where’s Current with its sensitive, passionate reporting?