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.”

This past week we learned that USA Today was launching a major rethinking of its newsroom structure. The Associated Press reported:

“USA Today, the nation’s second largest newspaper, is making the most dramatic overhaul of its staff in its 28-year history as it de-emphasizes its print edition and ramps up its effort to reach more readers and advertisers on mobile devices.”

The goal is to focus less on print, more on the Web and mobile, and the search for a new audience. Sounds good so far. But it’s the details where things start to get interesting:

“The newsroom instead will be broken up into a cluster of ‘content rings’ each headed up by editors who will be appointed later this year. The newly created content group will be overseen by Susan Weiss, who had been managing editor of the Life section. As executive editor of content, Weiss will report to USA Today Editor John Hillkirk.”

That move was applauded by design guru Mario Garcia:

“Indeed, out go the traditional departments that have been the cornerstone of newspapers worldwide; in comes an approach where the tyranny of departmentalizing goes out the window, to allow for a more flexible and content driven force to prevail in the newsroom.”

Here’s what’s good about it. The traditional departments are tied to the print sections. As along as they remain in place, the core culture of the newsroom is built around the print edition. And incentives remain tied to print, because section editors are thinking everyday about how to serve the print beast which needs things like centerpieces to make them work.

Pulling away from that way of thinking will require more than just re-organizing the newsroom into different groups. Remember, just four years ago, Gannett was revolutionizing its newsrooms, turning them into “information centers.”

At the time, one Gannett exec said: “We will no longer be print-centric. We will be multi-platform ready 24/7.”

It’s not clear to what degree if any that USA Today got on board with this change. But if not, why not? Why, four years later, is USA Today suddenly re-discovering the wisdom of moving away from a print-centric newsroom? The point is that it takes more than memos and slideshows and layoffs and job title changes to reinvent the culture and the product.

Because the print product will still be there, and it will still have the same needs. Where this new approach will succeed or fail is in the dozens of decisions that get made every day in the newsroom about where to focus efforts. The people on the frontlines, the editors and staff, have to buy this new approach and fight to make it work every day. As the AP story notes:

“Although USA Today still makes most of its money from its print edition, the reorganization revolves around smart phones and computer tablets such as Apple Inc.’s iPad, which are creating new ways to sell subscriptions and advertising.

‘We have to go where the audience is,’ Hillkirk said. ‘If people are hitting the iPad like crazy, or the iPhone or other mobile devices, we’ve got to be there with the content they want, when they want it.’ “

Absolutely the right mindset.

Now, here’s the part where students of tradition will pause, and swallow hard:

“In a move that may raise conflict-of-interest questions, Weiss will have a ‘collaborative relationship’ with USA Today’s newly appointed vice president of business development, Rudd Davis, according to one slide.”

At this point, with revenue in a nosedive, all news organizations need to be exploring new ways of generating income. And in theory, there should be nothing wrong with creating more ties between business and editorial sides. Traditionalists seem to forget that back in more flush times, newspapers always ran special sections around certain topics that were initiated by the business side, largely because they could sell ads, and then the newsroom trotted along to create relevant stories to fill the section.

What USA Today must be careful to navigate is what is truly driving newsroom decisions. For instance, there’s nothing wrong with launching a green tech micro-site because the paper sees big advertising potential there. But the content can still be hard hitting and thought provoking and critical, without just being Valentines written to potential advertisers. If that happens, or appears to be happening, then the paper’s credibility will take a big hit.

Finally, what the story didn’t mention, but was hopefully in the presentation to USA staffers, was talk of new job descriptions in this new newsroom. Will there be new community managers, journalist programmers, etc.? I hope this is a part of the big change, but we’ll see. It’s no fun to see them cutting 130 jobs. But hopefully some of that leaves them room to bring in non-traditional newsroom employees who can infuse this new structure with some radical thinking.

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.”

This morning, I was reading the New York Times story on why location-based services might be a hard sell for mainstream users. This echoes some of my own thoughts, which I wrote about recently here: Telling the world you’re here, there and everywhere. And here: Location services show the way to the next great Internet bubble.

I was curious what kind of reaction their story was getting from readers. But I couldn’t find the comment section. So I’m wondering: Is that standard? It seems there are comments on some stories, but not others. Does anyone know the Times’ policy? I couldn’t even find a place to post a comment.

The other thing that surprised me: I wanted to tweet the article out. But there’s no Twitter button. That seems like such a standard feature, I find it odd that it’s not there. There’s a Facebook button right on the article. And when I click “share” I get a choice of six social media buttons, but not Twitter.

Does anyone else find that to be a strange omission?

The latest roundup of stories we’re reading around the Web about the future of news.

MediaShift . While Others Shrink, KQED Expands Cross-Platform News | PBS

Katie Donnelly writes: “Last month, KQED News in San Francisco dramatically expanded the scope of its news coverage with a new website, an increase from six to 16 local radio newscasts and the addition of eight news staffers, including six producers/reporters, a developer and a social media specialist. Its expansion will continue over the next several months (look for a new news blog in the next couple of months).”

Reflections of a Newsosaur: Yahoo readies San Francisco news site

Alan Mutter writes: “Though hundreds of news shops of every shape and size already cover Northern California, Yahoo will be an instantly formidable competitor because of its vast market reach.”

InvestigateWest: Lessons from the first year | Knight Digital Media Center

Rita Hibbard writes: “Doing good work isn’t enough to save journalism. Fighting to preserve the legacy isn’t the place you want to be. I knew that going into the launch of InvestigateWest just over a year ago, hard lessons learned living through the closure of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a newspaper with a long history of strong local coverage and investigative journalism.”

Reflections of a Newsosaur: Flagship newspapers wane in audience mix

Alan Mutter writes: “The flagship newspaper produces barely half of the weekday audience delivered by some major metro publishers, according to an analysis of data recently issued by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.”

COFFEE, BARS AND NEWSPAPERS

@giner writes: “Coffee, Bars and Newspapers. Not a bad cocktail. From readers to audiences and communities. Do you know any newspapers running coffees or bars?”

Research shows Twitter’s value in questioning rumors « The Buttry Diary

Steve Buttry writes: “If you listen to and read the Twitter haters, you also hear that Twitter is a place where false rumors spread rapidly. My reply to that is that Twitter is a form of communication, and rumors spread on all forms of communication.”

How Technology Is Renewing Attention to Long-form Journalism

Mallary Jean Tenore writes: “Five guys — Nate Weiner of Read It Later, Marco Arment of Instapaper, Max Linsky and Aaron Lammer of Longform.org, and Mark Armstrong of @LongReads — have found ways to use Web tools to renew attention to long-form journalism, increase its shelf life and make it easier for people to consume and share it.”

Structured news: Make useful connections to build your news business | Knight Digital Media Center

Amy Gahran writes: “Stories are the most common way to package news. But despite how well the narrative story format works with the human brain, it’s generally not the best way to ensure that information and context get discovered online. To a large extent, news stories trap the value of information like a fly in amber.”

PJNet – Blog – Patch.com seeks dozens of Atlanta metro journalists

Len Witt writes: “Patch.com, the hyperlocal journalism start-up on which AOL is betting $50 million dollars, is searching for several dozen journalists to edit and run local community sites throughout the Atlanta metro area. The pay is between $35,000 — $45,000 a year plus benefits. It comes with a freelance budget too.”

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.

The latest roundup of stories we’re reading around the Web about the future of news.

MediaShift Idea Lab . How Training Citizen Journalists Made a Difference | PBS

Harry Dugmore wrote: “Can democracy work and good government happen without local media?”

Choose Your Multimedia Tools Strategically: Story is Still King

Marc Cooper writes: “Choosing the right tool to tell the right story is one of the greatest challenges we faced during this summer’s round of Carnegie-Knight News21 fellowships at USC Annenberg. Our mandate, like that of any cutting-edge news crew, was to at once tell the most in-depth stories while being as innovative as possible. But sometimes these two principles can pull against each other.”

Four ways to use Fast Follow – Twitter Media

If you haven’t been reading Twitter’s media blog, you definitely should. This post supplies four tips your newsroom could start using today.

Digital Magazines Could Give Industry a Billion-Dollar Boost in Near Future | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD

Peter Kafka writes: “Will tablets save the magazine business? Nope. But if the industry’s hopes for the iPad and its ilk pan out, digital editions could give the industry a billion-dollar boost in a few years.”

Study: iPad is preferred method of reading newspapers and magazines among consumers already owning the device in UK.

Cooper Murphy Webb writes: “According to a poll by Cooper Murphy Webb, the copywriters, Apple’s iPad is the preferred method of reading newspapers and magazines among consumers already owning the device. The poll also found that a plurality of iPad owners prefer the device for reading books and gaming.”

PJNet – Blog – Minnesota’s BringMeTheNews gets $1 million investment

Len Witt writes: “Yikes, Joel Kramer is beating the bushes for funding original journalism at MinnPost and then along comes BringMeTheNews and gets a $1 million investment for a news aggregating site centered on Minnesota.”

Patch: AOL’s Plan To Own Your Neighborhood – Forbes.com

Quentin Hardy writes: “Patch, AOL’s effort to own America’s local news, said it has grown to 100 sites in 20 states, up from six sites since the company bought the fledgling news startup in June 2009. AOL also said it hopes to be in 500 communities by year’s end, and will hire 500 more journalists for Patch. That would likely make it the biggest hirer in the decimated industry in some years.”

Knight Foundation’s new biz consultant thinks news startups can learn from outside of journalism » Nieman Journalism Lab

PJNet – Blog – Slate Launches Experimental Multimedia Lab

NewsTrust.net – Blog: Truthsquad Results: How to Fact-Check the News

Fabrice Florin writes: “My transition from writer to video journalist has not been comfortable. I constantly fumbled with the tripod — right in front of my subject — which was about as embarrassing as getting caught with one’s fly open. And I spent so many hours late into the evening with the video editing software Final Cut Express that I wondered whether I was even doing journalism anymore, or computer science.”

The latest roundup of stories we’re reading around the Web about the future of news.

A Visit to the Online-Only Seattle Post-Intelligencer | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD

ProPublica’s Top-Paid Employees All Made Six Figures in 2009 – mediabistro.com: FishbowlNY

This is why I have a hard time supporting many non-profit news models. These pay levels are outrageous. And worse, unsustainable.

Why TBD is Important – Recovering Journalist

Mark Potts writes: “I think TBD, just launched this week, is an incredibly important development for the future of local news, for many reasons.”

@michelemclellan on: “Emerging models for local news: Charlottesville Tomorrow partners with the daily newspaper.”

Facebook Had Offered Foursquare $120 Million, Foursquare Asked For $150 Million, Then Facebook Walked Away

peHUB » What Happened To Demand Media’s Traffic?

Crowdmap launches

“Crowdmap is designed and built by the people behind Ushahidi, a platform that was originally built to crowdsource crisis information. As the platform has evolved, so have its uses. Crowdmap allows you to set up your own deployment of Ushahidi without having to install it on your own web server.”

The Media Equation – New York Magazine’s Lessons for Harman and Newsweek – NYTimes.com

David Carr writes: “Let me get this straight: A very rich guy buys a financially and editorially beleaguered weekly magazine, saying he wants to preserve an important journalistic asset. That will never work, right?

I have three words for the haters: New York magazine.”

Allbritton On TBD.com: ‘You’ve Got To Have Some Staying Power’ | paidContent

Staci Kramer: “When Robert Allbritton put the money and power of Allbritton Communications behind a new DC political news site in 2007, no one knew what to expect.”

MediaShift Idea Lab . Wikileaks Case Illustrates Need for Compelling Storytelling | PBS

Andrew Whitacre writes: “Today there is another disconnect, highlighted by WikiLeaks’ publication of tens of thousands of documents purporting to show that the war in Afghanistan is going much worse and with much more innocent bloodshed than the government has admitted. Wikileaks frames this documentation similar to that of the Pentagon Papers, claiming that there’s dissonance in what the government is saying and what the public now knows.

But there’s not.

The disconnect, instead, is entirely within the public. The unsavory work of special forces, the unnecessary death of civilians, the unpalatable role of Pakistan in propping up the Taliban: All of these were already well documented. The public, however, simply didn’t know or didn’t care. The disconnect is between hearing facts and then feeling compelled to act on them.”