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S.O.S. (Save Our Scribes) pt. 2
May 7, 2009We write things down. We do it consistently and mostly coherently.
We have existed since before the times when little kids with faces tarnished by soot screamed "extra! extra!" and hawked the newsprint in busy corners, on bus stops and other places.
We are a species on the danger of extinction. We are print journalists.
But we are not going without a fight, and Amazon threw us a lifeline of sorts.
Enter the Kindle DX, pricey, large and capable of delivering full newspaper pages to your hands (via sprint's 3G network). Hooray for Amazon! they invested their R & D bucks and launched a product that might help turn the tide on the side of newspapers.
Hold on, pump your brakes. Apparently, we are celebrating a short term fix, a bandaid, if you will.
I can't even list all of the different bloggers, industry analysts, etc, who have chimed in calling our bluff. After reading a few of their posts, I can only surmise that the consensus is that this move is too little and perhaps too late.
So what to do then? Michael Hickins from Information Week brought up a few good ideas on this post.
He writes about a possibility for publishers to band together and work on a content delivery service built around a device, sort of a soda machine but with printable content a-la-carte.
Picture this, you are at Starbucks getting your $6 coffee on (if you still can afford it of course) and you want to read the latest on your Rider Raiders beating the snot out of some other team (abusando) you could walk up to this machine and insert your TRN bucks card and print out Nick Gholson's treatment on the game. Just for you and no one else. Wouldn't that be nice?
Of course, the page - and the machine - will possibly carry a few ads by -insert local business here- gotta pay the bills right? But you wouldn't mind as long as you got your .10 cent story in full color or .5 cents for b/w?
The interesting point in Hickins posting is that we have the technology, but somehow we are scared to jump into it. It is no secret that our business model is outdated and that changes are needed to survive, but are we truly innovating when a company like Amazon takes the lead on something we should have a few patents on?
As journalists, we are proactive in our investigations, but largely do a lot of reactionary work. When something happens, we like to get reactions, from official sources all the way to Tamiko who just happened to be near the site of the event. Because we are not precognitive, news has to happen for us to report them, we can't make them. And when we do, it's not so good. There's a few Stephen Glass references that fit here.
Unfortunately, being reactionary only benefits journalists in seeing the big picture, but in the business world, a combination of both is the key to success.
This is my plea to our kind overlords in corporate newspaper land, take the lead. Get over the outdated newspaper culture and lets get these news out more efficiently. You all stand to make more money this way, instead of less money in our current incarnation. Who knows? perhaps this might help us remain relevant.
I don't know about you, but it will be a sad day on earth indeed when some of the most gutsy questions are asked by bloggers (see Perez Hilton and the folks at the Huffington Post)
Posted by Maurel Merette at 9:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
