The Next Newsroom Project

Tip of the hat to the Innovation in College Media blog for pointing out this fun presentation by UNC Daily Tar Heel’s Sara Gregory.

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In a few months, Microsoft will begin selling its Kinect for Xbox 360. The technology is based on the company’s Project Natal technology that allows users to interact with video games without use of a controller or a wand.

In this TED presentation, Peter Molyneux, head of Microsoft’s European gaming division, unveils a new form of interactive storytelling which incorporates Kinect and artificial intelligence. The user interacts with young boy named Milo without the need for any devices. It’s obviously beyond the reach of most newsrooms to leverage this at the moment. But it still provides an interesting glimpse of a new form of storytelling that will begin to evolve over the next decade.

Molyneux says:

“When I saw a piece of technology called Kinect — it was called Natal — I was inspired, and I thought for a moment, maybe it’s possible to address that one problem of storytelling, to create a character which seemed alive, which noticed me, that could look me in the eyes and feel real, and sculpt a story about our relationship.”

The Web is about to undergo an important shift with the adoption of HTML 5 and CSS3. I’ve been hearing about this for some time, and I’ve been talking to people about the new standards and trying to understand just what they mean. But nothing beats a good demo to break through some numbing techno babble. And this past week, we got a thrilling demonstration thanks to Arcade Fire and Google.

The Canadian band and Google teamed up to create what they’re calling an HTML 5 film called, “The Wilderness Downtown.” Though some critics have really noted that the film shows off HTLM 5 and CSS3.That’s an important technical distinction for developers. But what interests me is the greater dynamism and interactivity they allow. And that will create opportunities to rethink the way news organizations approach multimedia projects.

Many of us first heard about HTML 5 when Apple’s Steve Jobs starting talking it up while declaring war on Adobe’s Flash, the technology that powers most of the video we watch on the Web. Jobs criticized Adobe for not being more innovative with Flash, which he also called a processing hog. Adobe fired back. But this dispute seemed for most of us to be rather obscure. For that matter, I still don’t the rationale to keep Flash off the iPhone and iPad.

With the Arcade Fire film, we can now see what Jobs is talking about. And I have to say, I’m blown away.

To get the full effect, let me suggest you download Google’s Chrome Browser first. The film has been optimized to play in Chrome. (which brings up another issue that I’ll get to later.)

Then you go to The Wilderness Downtown and type in the address of your childhood home. This can be hit or miss, because the film is integrated with Google’s Street View. So the address needs to be one that Street View has filmed. If none of yours work, you can view my film here.

What unfolds next is astonishing, in my opinion. The film pulls in your address and mashes up the film with Google Maps and Street view. You see a video of a boy running down a suburban street, while his outline is also imposed into a satellite view of your neighborhood. As the music picks up pace, various panels open and close, like pop ups, showing different perspectives. At one point, as the boy spins around in one panel, the Street View spins around in another panel in sync revealing your/my house.

It’s hard to explain why, but this is deeply affecting. And it becomes more so when a postcard pops up, asking you to write a note to “your younger self.” You can then click on the postcard while the video is still playing and type a note, and draw, with your mouse, right on the postcard. Matched with the music, this becomes a powerful, emotional experience.

When it’s done, you can immediately see the potential for a new, more interactive multimedia storytelling. HTML 5 and CSS3 can be hard to understand from a technical perspective. But let me share the best explanation I’ve heard.

As the Web works now, when you want to do something like watch a video, you have to stick an object inside a container put it in the browser. One such container is Flash. But when you put something in Flash, it’s like putting plastic wrap around it. You can’t search on it. You can’t interact with it much. With HTML 5, you can now run video in the browser without the plastic wrap around it.

So in the case of things like the Arcade Fire video, you can let people interact with it in real time, and you can continually mash it up with different things on the Web.

In the case of a news organization, I can imagine all sorts of ways to build a crowdsourced video of some event by putting the initial video on the Web, and then allowing other people to contribute data to it so that it morphs the video, or in some instances, allows them to personalize it. Looking back at the Haiti earthquake, imagine starting with a reported segment that then allows people to enter different addresses to view damage in specific areas. This would be hard to do for a breaking clip, but if you created a huge database of crowdsourced photos and video that were geo-tagged, there’s an interesting possibility.

And of course, this is just one example. You can see other Chrome experiments here.

For another perspective on the shift to HTML 5, take a few minutes to watch this video of Scribd founder Jared Friedman talking earlier this year at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Scribd allows you to upload documents and view them through a Flash file. Earlier this year, the company made a bold decision to scrap Flash and move to HTML 5. Among the advantages: The text of the documents placed inside Flash can’t be searched. But with HTML 5, now they can be read by search engines.

Here’s Friedman:

And here’s his slides:

Scribd: HTML5 & The Future of Publishing

One final note: While this is all very exciting, it’s also going to be a potential pain. HTML 5 standards are still being worked out, and it’s expected they’ll be implemented over the course of a decade. Each browser developer must bake the new standards into their product, and many will do so at different paces. That means we could be headed for a long stretch of compatability issues, like the ones we had in the 1990s with Navigator and Explorer. (When every site had a ‘this site best viewed in…’ sign somewhere).

In the case of the Arcade Fire, there’s been some grumbling that the site seems optimized for Chrome, and tries to steer you there, when Firefox also has some HTML 5 baked in, as does Microsoft’s next version of Explorer. For more on that potential headache, read this solid write-up from TechCrunch about the “Coming Browser Wars.”

Found via the FlowingData blog, which says:

“Connoisseur of scaled rounded rectangles, bubbles, and triangles, David McCandless of Information is Beautiful talks data visualization in recently posted TED talk (below). He explains how information design can help us get through information glut on the Web and how simple charts can show patterns that we never would have seen otherwise. He uses his own works and collaborations as evidence.”

Digg, the crowd-sourced news aggregation site that was once a Web 2.0 darling, is on the cusp of a dramatic overhaul of its site.

I’ve been playing with the “new” Digg for a few weeks now, which is still officially in an invite-only alpha. And I think it offers up two important lessons for people working in newsrooms of all shapes and sizes.

The first is that innovation must be a continuous process. Digg took its eye off the ball, and has lost significant momentum.

The second lesson is that the new Digg places more value on what our friends are doing, rather than a larger crowd of strangers. Digg is embracing the notion that our social networks are increasingly the most valuable way we discover news and information.

Let’s take the first lesson. Too often, I hear people in newsrooms say they need to reinvent what they do. But often it’s put in terms that are singular. Like, if we just create a newsroom optimized for today’s digital world, we’ll be fine. The problem, as we can see from Digg, is that the Web continues to evolve at a rapid pace that is accelerating. And that means that the ideal service or process today needs to be constantly changed and reinvented, not just re-thought once.

In Silicon Valley, we can see that in the rapid rise and fall of any number of companies. Just a few years ago, everyone thought auctions were the way we wanted to shop online, and eBay was king during the first few years of the last decade. Yahoo also fell quickly from a lofty perch. And then, MySpace got slapped by Facebook. In each case, the company in question got too comfortable with its core service, and assumed incorrectly that it would endure. That’s not just a trap that newspapers fall into, it’s a larger problem with the culture of successful organizations.

To avoid that fate, newsrooms need to develop the capacity to continually innovate. Once is not enough. If  that process stops, they’ll inevitably find themselves being left behind by the way the Web changes.

Just a couple years ago, everyone in the news business was in awe of Digg, and it’ ability to drive traffic, the lessons it taught us about the way game theory could be incorporated into news discovery, and the power of the crowd. There was the infamous 2006 Businessweek cover story on Digg founder Kevin Rose: “How this kid made $60 million in 18 months.”

Digg was revolutionary, until it wasn’t. See this chart from the Nielsen Company:



Digg has lost over half its traffic in the past two years, and it’s an ever steeper fall from a year ago. It’s probably no coincidence that those were the years that saw Facebook and Twitter come to dominate the social Web. Digg stood still, and paid the price.

Thus, the new Digg. The company is attempting a radical shift. Is it too late? We’ll see over the next year.

The second lesson goes to the heart of the way Digg is changing, and what it says about the Web. The new Digg focuses much more on the things your friends are reading and “digg-ing” and the news brands that you choose to follow on Digg. The rankings of what the whole mass of Digg users are reading is still there, but very much de-emphasized.

The new Digg makes it clear that the first thing it wants you to do is “See what the people you follow are digging.” There is still a “top news” tab to see what is now called the “classic Digg.” (Are Classic Coke jokes inevitable?) But that is very much secondary.

Whether it succeeds or not, I think this is the right move for Digg for now. Unfortunately, there aren’t many second acts. And Digg is in a downward spiral that most never manage to escape.

Are you using the new Digg? If so, share your thoughts below on how it compares to, ahem, “classic” Digg.