WHAT'S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS

When the CEO of Google says that very soon they will make more money with Mobile than with Internet, imagine a Mobile Tablet and you will understand why the Apple coming tablet could be a dramatic innovation.

Business are moving to Mobile.

Realtor, like Zillow and Sawbuck, are taking their listings to the iPhone.

If you use Realtor, you will be able to access to about 4 million listings across the United States that they say are updated every 15 minutes.

Realtor say the new app will allow home shoppers to search for open houses within a 20-mile radius, sorted by location or date. Users can take camera-phone photos of listings as they tour them, assign them star ratings, jot notes on the phone, and quickly post listings to their Twitter or Facebook pages–or e-mail them to friends, family and their buyer’s agent.

Many newspapers still think that the only strategy to save their classifieds is to move them to Internet.

Well, too late.

Move tham to Mobile.

That’s the future.

Tags: Apple Tablet, Classifieds, Facebook, Google, Real State. Moble, Sawbuck, The Realtor, Twitter, Zillow, iPhone, internet

From the 2009  Online News Aassociation’s Conference:

By 2012, 95 percent of content on the Internet will be video.

I agree.

My Finnish friend Jussi Tuulensuu,  the great designer of Kauppalehti Optio magazine drills on  some INNOVATION ideas and goes to the point with this Journalism 101 post:

JOURNALISM

HOW TO DO IT

1. Based on your knowledge about what the reader is interested in, decide what you want to tell and then tell just that.

2. Form follows data. Show, don’t tell.

3. Interesting is the new important.

CURRENT FACTS

1. Life is too short to read boring newspapers. Thanks to the Internet, people have noticed this.

2. Media are not that much in crisis, but journalism is.

SOLUTIONS

1. Stop repackaging the news, start creating them.

2. Edit more. Create better concepts. From newspapers to newszines, from magazines to mooks.

3. Our core business is selling interesting stories – not colour processing wood fiber. From great papers with websites to great websites with great papers.

Bravo!

Another newspaper casualty in Michigan, this time in Ann Arbor, the lively college town near Detroit.

I know this area very well as I was a resident of Detroit for more than six years, and Ann Arbor was one of my favorite places.

The University of Michigan is a first-class educational center.

But the local paper, The Ann Arbor News, was not.

At all.

And I am very sorry that its owners have decided to end its life after 174 years in business.

But, please, don’t sell me the idea that this a newspaper that died because of the internet, and that young people don’t read newspapers.

This paper died because it was dead.

It was obsolete.

It was unnecessary.

Period.

It is being replaced by AnnArbor.com, an online news site that will produce a print edition twice a week, on Thursday and Sunday.

Charles Eisendrath, who runs a fellowship program for journalists at the University of Michigan, said a mainly online news operation with staffers receiving smaller salaries “looks like something on the cheap.”

Aha, aha!

My comment on this lousy new story in this week’s The Economist:

Gentlemen,

Sorry but this is too much space for very little new information and few original ideas.

The crisis of many traditional mono-media (print publications and radio outlets: text or audio) and bi-media operations (television: audio+video) is that they offer very little unique and relevant content.

I read and I pay for The Economist because 90% of the time (sorry, not in this case) it adds value to the news.

It’s different, and it’s worth my money.

But 90% of what many newspapers, magazines, radio and television news operations produce is just recycled news garbage.

They are repackaging-news operations.

So, the Internet is better, faster and cheaper.

Regarding the “financial crisis” of many of the best U.S. newspaper companies (Tribune, NYT, etc.), let’s not forget that they are paying the consequences of very bad management, terrible M&As, and an irresponsible leadership that didn’t re-invest the huge profits of the recent past in their own core business.

Only the best will survive, yes, but at the same time only if they are able to re-invent themselves as “online-centric news organizations.”

That’s the real challenge.

Not the one from outside, but from inside.

What we need is more Innovation and change: more demos and less memos, more doing and less talking, more prototyping and less conceptualizing.

As always: too much analysis = paralysis.