1. A closed, confortable and standardized environment to receive content. Like good old magazines, but with video and rich-media ads.
2. An opportunity to charge for content again, by creating scarcity, taking advantage of the walled garden of the iTunes store and selling apps like they sold magazines in the past.

But this approach overlooked several important flaws:

1. Apple, while the biggest player in the market (at least for now), is not the only one. Any effort would have to be repeated, and then maintained, to gain more potential audience for any other platform (Android, Blackberry…). It’s not escalable.
2. There is a bottleneck at the distribution stage, and you’re at the mercy of Apple’ internal app approval policies.
3. The company has to give Apple a 30% cut of their subscription sales through the app, and probably will not have access to their subscribers’ data.
4. In september, almost 40 million iPads were sold worldwide since the tablet was introduced one year and a half before. Why would you limit to a potential audience of 40 million when there are hundreds of millions of other devices capable of internet access?
5. What will happen when the iPad and iOS are surpassed by newer, better technologies? Change is unavoidable, and in a world of planned obsolescence, it doesn’t make much sense to tie yourself to a product that will be obsolete in a few years.

Lately, there has been a trend that seems to take a more thoughtful, long-term. sustainable approach called responsive design. The first to jump the boat was the Financial Times, with an HTML5 app that avoids the iTunes app store and lets users access the app directly through the browser. That was a good start, but it was still rooted on the idea of developing an specific product for just one platform, in this case, iOS.

Instead, Propublica made some changes in their site to allowed it to adapt to the screen size of the visitor’s device, whether smartphone or tablet of any size, and independently of the device’s operating system.

The redesign of the Boston Globe was an even more ambitious project. It’s probably the first news website fully redesigned under the responsive web design paradigm, which means it’ll adapt its layout to the characteristics of the device used to acces the site.

If journalism is not a product, it’s a process, a platform-agnostic approach that will deliver, with quality, consistence and coherence, the same news, reports, analysis and commentary, no matter what you use to read them, makes much more sense. It also allows the company to retain control and independence over their most important assets: their audience and how they access their content.

Over 2012 we’ll see more and more media companies sailing away from the siren chants of the iPad and getting the control of their own future back with HTML5 responsive design websites. Those who don’t will see their efforts scattered ineffectively accross a handful of platforms, draining precious resources away from meaningful innovation.

This article was previously published in the blog of the ESCACC Foundation (Espai Català de Cultura i Comunicació, in catalan) and in ElEConomista / CanalPDA (spanish).

Red hues: Below average
Green: Around average
Blue hues: Above average

I see a trend around the Diagonal. Urbanism influenced wealth distribution around the city, or the other way around? What has been the impact of gentrification (Olympic Games, Fórum, 22@) in Vila Olímpica, Diagonal Mar, and Parc i Llacuna del Poblenou?

This map is going to be one of the exercises I’ll teach at a data visualization workshop organized by Media140, on November 7th, at Vilaweb, in Barcelona.

¿Cómo se explican estas diferencias? En el caso del Colectivo de Víctimas del Terrorismo del País Vasco la inclusión de las víctimas de los Comandos Autónomos Anticapitalistas como víctimas de ETA infla el número hasta llegar a 952. La esquizofrenia de La Vanguardia se debe a que una de las noticias es de la agencia EFE, que da por bueno el número de 858, mientras que la información propia se queda con 829. Este número es el reconocido oficialmente por el Ministerio de Interior y el Gobierno Vasco, mientras que la Asociación Víctimas del Terrorismo defiende el número de 858, probablemente incluyendo víctimas de incidentes o acciones terroristas no reconocidas por ETA. Los números de la Fundación Víctimas del Terrorismo y de ABC probablemente estén simplemente desactualizados respecto a sus fuentes, mientras que el origen del número de El Mundo es un misterio, puesto que no se acerca a ninguna de las otras fuentes.

Mención aparte merece La Información en este conjunto de gráficos, en el que cada uno tiene una cifra total de víctimas diferente.

Primera víctima mortal: ¿1960 o 1968?

La fecha del primer atentado mortal de ETA también es controvertida. Algunos medios dan por buena la atribución a ETA de la muerte del bebé de 2 años Begoña Urroz Ibarrola en un atentado con bombas incendiarias en la estación de tren de Amara en 1960, a pesar de que ETA nunca ha reivindicado este atentado y de que la mayoría de fuentes apuntan al DRIL (Directorio Revolucionario Ibérico de Liberación). Oficialmente, la primera víctima mortal de ETA es José Pardines Arcay, en 1968.

They didn’t innovate much in content production or presentation as well. Newspaper sections have remained virtually untouched for years, the same classification and categorization of information today as the newspapers that served society 100 years ago. When internet emerged in the 90′s, they used the same information architecture in the new channel. Ultimately, newsrooms are meant to produce, following a set of rules and processes, not to do research and development, and those kind of departments are rare in most but the biggest media companies.

With revenue streams getting thinner and management struggling to maintain media companies profitable (or reduce losses), even cutting newsroom resources, R&D is not a priority, if it ever was. Some of the most disruptive innovations in advertising, information architecture and content in the last years have not come from media companies:

• Think of how Craigslist established a new standard for online classifieds, historically a business dominated by newspapers, and one of their main revenue streams.
• How Google first, and Groupon later developed ways to put in touch local businesses with consumers online. Both of which are natural newspaper customers, although in different ends of the product chain.
• How newspapers didn’t get the need for CRM and analytics and a better understanding and insight on their audiences until it was too late, and social networks appeared to provide advertisers with a profiled audience to develop targetted advertising programs.
• How newspapers not only skipped the chance to bypass intermediaries, like distribution chains, when trying to sell digital subscriptions to consumers, but jumped in the wagon when Apple demanded a 30% cut of their subscription revenue to iPad apps.
• And how that demonstrates that newspaper and media companies seem fixated on the idea of “channel” instead of focusing on creating platform-agnostic content.

Innovation happens in the fringes

But not everything is that bad. We have had our share of innovation in media in the last 10 years. It just hasn’t come from media companies, but from the fringes of the media ecosystem, or even outside of it.

• Storify, a tool to organize and create a narrative around curated content from social networks, is co-founded by a journalist.
• Google Living Stories was developed by Google in partnership with the New York Times and The Washington Post. It’s a way to organize news content around an ongoing issue in a way that makes it easy to understand the timeline of events, as well as the access to all the related content.
• One of the first mashups, ChicagoCrime.org, which had a clear impact in the current interest and attention on data visualization, including its adoption in newspapers and media, was created single-handedly by one journalist, Adrian Holovaty. His later company, Everyblock, which geolocates content from several sources in several of the major US cities, was acquired by MSNBC.

Collaboration and partnerships

If we can learn something from these stories, is that for media companies innovation can, and will happen thanks to collaboration and partnership. In this process, institutions like the Knight Foundation have been critical, as it has provided funding to projects that otherwise may have not received it, and pushed an spirit of sharing and collaboration, demanding, for example, that software developed using its grant is released under the GPL license, and all the other material under Creative Commons licenses. A perfect example would be one of their funded projects, DocumentCloud, also a partnership between ProPublica and the New York Times, is an open source tool to share, analyze and annotate source documents, and is currently used by more than 200 newsrooms in the US.

Hacks / Hackers, an informal and loose network of meetups of journalists and programmers, which recently has seen the birth of a new chapter in Madrid,  is another example of collaboration, very focused on software development for newsrooms. One of the most interesting projects lately is PDFSpy, which allows to monitor changes to a large set of hosted PDF files, like the ones released by Spanish congressmen and senators. That way, a journalist would receive an alert if something is added, or removed from any of the 614 pdf documents.

In Spain we have meetups (Café y Periodismo, the upcoming Hacks / Hackers), research groups (1001 medios) and hybrids of both (BCNMediaLab, which I co-founded). These are outlets for journalists to meet, debate and share ideas and projects, but I feel we’re going to need to take these initiatives (or new ones) a step further in order to generate the collaboration and contribute to the innovation our industry needs.

This post was first published in catalan in the blog of the ESCACC Foundation (Espai Català de Cultura i Comunicació).

QR codes transform the physical world into a digital interface, linking atoms to bits just using a smartphone. As such, they could be used with success in printed media to cross the gap between publishing time and real time, between the limitations of print and the possibilities of online rich media. They require an smartphone, able to use a QR code recognition app and internet access to retrieve the linked content. That means the use of QR codes could be limited to US and Western Europe, but that will change over the next few years. These are a few ideas that could enrich the experience of reading a print newspaper.

In advertising, QR codes could change the print business model from selling audiences to advertisers to include additional cost per click (CPC) and cost per action (CPA) models:

• Track advertising actions from consumers, so the newspaper could demonstrate a direct, proven link between advertising and sales. A QR code could be a link to an online store, but also to a coupon to be redeemed in a brick-and-mortar store.
• Generate extra revenue through affiliate sales: from advertising, but also from shows and movie listings, product reviews…

Embedded in editorial content, the uses of QR codes can get more creative:

• Provide a link to an online updated version of the print article. This would avoid the feeling of old-news when covering fast-unfolding events. Think of a citizen revolt that may have already succeed or maybe been repressed by the time the newspaper hit the stands. This would also relieve pressure on print to compete with other channels and allow it to focus on long, in-depth stories that provide context.
• Provide a link to an archive or series of articles around the same topic. Useful for infrequent readers if the article is one in a series.
• Or maybe you’d want to let users download an ebook or pdf of that coverage. Add Paypal or other easy-to-use payment system and you have another revenue stream that takes advantage of already produced content.
• When there is a high profile event, the limits of print mean that only a small part of the work of the photography staff can be featured in the printed newspaper. Those limits don’t exist online, where picture galleries are common. You can provide a link to the online full picture gallery from the printed newspaper. Or to (curated, of course) user-generated content around that particular event.
• Sometimes, graphic support can come in the form of an infographic, or static data visualization, like when presenting election results. The next step would be to provide a link for the online, interactive version of that data visualization.
• The same idea could be applied when rich-media could provide useful context to the printed story, like footage about a riot, a sport event, or access to the full video interview with a high-profile individual.
• It’s quite common, at least in Spain, to read (or, more likely, browse) the newspaper while in a coffee or a bar. If you see an interesting article, a QR code can be used to bookmark the online version of the story for later read. Most likely this would be a sort of partnership with services like Delicious, Reading, Instapaper or similar.
• QR codes can also be used to collect feedback or content from print readers.

Also, copying wikipedia’s idea would be a great marketing campaign for a newspaper: put ads for your paper with QR codes specific for that location, linking to coverage of that location. Or ads emphasizing an important topic (sports, education, politics…) with a QR code that links to online coverage of that topic.

These advertising and editorial uses of QR codes have an important consequence: they generate data that can be processed to obtain usage patterns and other insights, which can be quite valuable for advertising and content production.

The idea of using QR codes in print newspapers has been around for over more than two years, but so far, the main adopters of QR codes have been advertisers and print magazines. They have been using it to provide extra content to promotions, or enhanced magazine covers. In one of such cases, Esquire used codes similar to QR to provide enhanced reality content for its cover and a few pages of content, but, besides being a one-time effort, it’s not really the same as linking to online content and services.

There’s a warning, though. QR codes are just an implementation of an idea: the link between the real world and relevant information about it online. It’s a technology with a great danger of being rendered obsolete by a better implementation. Think of Google Goggles, for example, which uses text and image recognition technology to do Google searches or text translations from a picture taken by your smartphone. As these implementations evolve, a more seamless link between atoms and bits could appear, a better interface for integrating print and online content, but the idea would remain the same.

The process was completed after just 4 days, but the experience was not entirely satisfactory:

• The spreadsheet was too slow to be used with more than 50 people editing simultaneously.
• Anonymous editing was allowed from the beginning, but it was difficult to cope with erased / lost data. Because of simultaneous editing, recovering an earlier instance of the spreadsheet meant losing data as well from more recent edits.
• At some point, spam finally came and anonymous editing was closed. The amount of people working on the spreadsheet dropped to 12-15.
• Anonymous edits were also the laziest: unfinished sentences and skipped sections.
• Data columns for currencies or dates need to be formatted before the spreadsheet is made public to avoid confusion and different formattings by the contributors.
• An editor is needed to overview the process, secure that there is a standard in the transcription process and ensure that there’s no missing data.

There’s another crowdsourcing process going on with the objective to put together all the properties and assets data from members of the Congress: spreadsheet and hashtag.

Bet you didn’t know that half of the population of Barcelona wasn’t born there. Yeah, me neither. I’m one of the 30k something Galicians we now call Barcelona home, almost 2% of the total population. This modest visualization was done with Impure, using data from the Open Data initiative by the Barcelona city council from the 2009 census. Hover your mouse over the colored areas to see the the place of birth that corresponds with each figure.

Esta es la versión beta de la presentación que utilicé ayer en el taller de periodismo de datos que la gente de Media140 me ofreció presentar. A última hora hice algunos cambios en la estructura y el orden de la presentación. Intentaré actualizarlo el viernes con la estructura que usé en el taller, notas y la referencia a Florence Nightingale que se me pasó incluir.

• Bottup / Nxtmedia
• RUIDO Photo
• Anversal
• FronteraD

Los rasgos en común a estos proyectos son las estructuras cortas, la vocación de red, colaboración sobre competición – algo en los que Pau Llop de Nxtmedia hace especial hincapié – y la diversidad de fuentes de ingresos y de actividad. Son tres características que encajan con las predicciones de Luís Martín Cabiedes en la entrevista de Manuel Ángel-Méndez:

P. ¿Qué consejos le darías a un periodista-emprendedor que quiera montar un proyecto?
R. La mala noticia es para las empresas de medios, no para los periodistas. Igual que el problema de la música lo tienen las discográficas, no los músicos. Los periodistas, como los músicos, tendrán que ir haciendo bolos. Pero no lo digo en sentido peyorativo, hay buenas oportunidades ahí. No va haber empresas de medios de comunicación en las que trabajar o será muy difícil. Por eso lo mejor es que encuentren su nicho, busquen su público, se hagan fuertes ahí, creen contenidos que la gente quiera leer, que es de lo que siempre se ha tratado, y que no sean más de 4-5 en plantilla. Igual que una banda de música.

• Vicent Partal nos contará su periplo con Vilaweb, uno de los primeros medios nativos digitales en España, que recientemente ha cumplido 15 años.
• Christian de Angelis y Pilar Riaño: En marzo de 2010 lanzaron Modaes, una web de información económica y moda que en pocos meses ha logrado ser una referencia para el sector. Ambos trabajaban en Expansión.
• Valentí Sanjuan es miembro del equipo que está detrás de Vist i no Vist, un programa de radio que hasta el año pasado se emitía en Catalunya Ràdio y que ahora va por libre, emitiendo de forma independiente por internet.
• Andreu Caritg y Oriol Solé son dos de los periodistas que en en el 2002 fundaron Patabrava.com, una de las primeras redes sociales universitarias de España.

Si quieres asistir, apúntate aquí. ¡Te esperamos!