innovation

Talking to real people

In a comment, Tish Grier observes that Wall Street needs to get out and talk with real people. She's right, but so do newspapers. I just got back from several days in a local market where a team of Medill students did exactly that, interviewing hundreds of regular people -- women, youth, small business folks and so forth -- as part of a project building on the NewspaperNext Blueprint for Transformation. It's exciting stuff, and I look forward to being able to say more about it later.

Cramming, overshooting and Hearst's reader

It's been something like six months since the launch of the Times Reader, which I dissed as Microsoft's deja-vision of the future. Now Hearst, which owns the troubled Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has lined up with the dark side, announcing its own downloadable reader. Similar announcements have come from Forbes and London's Daily Mail.

Playing telephone with the change message

When I read the Gannett "Information Center" memo and its attached Q and A, I immediately worried that there was so much in it that it would be misinterpreted and lead to unpredictable side effects. Faced with the enormity of it all, people would naturally latch onto the little parts that felt most comfortable (like hard news 24x7, or video).

Disconnecting MOM

Back in the last century I participated in a New Directions for News workshop. We had one of those future-scenario breakout sessions, and my group sat down to design a new media product for 2010. Chris Mahai was our group leader, and she took us down an interesting, "jobs to be done" path (long before Innosight started throwing the phrase around). What would our lives be like in 2010?

Reinventing the wheel, Maslow's hammer, and programmer archaeologists

I was struck by Susan Elliott Sim's posting on Slashdot titled "No more coding from Scratch?" To me, the responses seemed to scatter far from the mark. We are reaching a point where the rules of technology development shift at a fundamental level.

This has a direct bearing on those of us working in media, as technology and media are now deeply interconnected. I'll illustrate some of the implications of that.