Journerdism | Will Sullivan's guide to mobile, tablet & emerging tech ideas

December 21, 2011
by Will Sullivan
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New Poynter eye-tracking study focuses on tablet design and user experience

Tablets have been around for a long time, it's time we learn how people use them

Tablets have been around for a while, it's time we finally learn how people use them.

Well, SND STL was amazing and is finally in the books. After a little recovery and catch-up-on-reading time, I’ve found my next side project: The Poynter Institute’s new eye-tracking study, focused on tablet design and user experiences.

I remember when the previous eyetracking studies were released it was kind of like this kid on Christmas morning. I’ve regularly referred to them and re-read them throughout my career and now to be involved in the project now is amazingly humbling and exciting. The group involved in this round of research is like my fantasy journalism design team: Sara Quinn, Dr. Mario Garcia, Jeremy Gilbert, David Stanton, Rick Edmonds, Regina McCombs, Roger Black, Rusty Coats, Andrew DeVigal, Jeff Sonderman, Jennifer George-Palilonis, Michael Holmes, Damon Kiesow, Miranda Mulligan, Tor Bøe-Lillegraven, Nora Paul, Robin Sloan, and Matt Thompson.

Our focus this time around, tablets, are an interesting beast because they seem to marry dynamic and interactive content of the web with the portability and “lean back” nature of print or even TV experiences. Often lumped in with mobile devices, tablets are similar, but very unique in many ways. Mobile is always with you and very utility, speed-driven; tablets tend to be portable within the house and workplace, and early research shows that people tend to consume more content and for longer periods on them than either mobile or the web.

We’re going to look at design challenges such as which view do people people prefer to consume content in most frequently – portrait or landscape. Even in those two options, I suspect the behaviors from users on an 10-inch, letter-box shaped device like the iPad may differ greatly from those on a 7″ tablet, like the Kindle Fire. Or the type of content they’re consuming will likely also change the results, from my personal anecdotal experience (and what I’ve observed in others), I tend to read text more frequently in portrait mode and video in landscape no matter what device. But that’s just anecdotal.

There’s lots to learn and this research will offer ‘more than a hunch’ solutions to help us all improve our products. Specifically, we’ll focus on some of these issues and questions, which Sara spelled out in her original announcement post:

Tools and tasks: How intuitive can tablet navigation be and how long does it take to successfully complete a task?
Satisfaction: How happy are users with an overall experience and how does that impact their perception of the credibility of the source?
Comprehension and retention: Which forms help people to understand and remember what they have seen or read?
Business and revenue: What strategies might work for news organizations? For advertisers? For consumers? How might editors set up a newsroom to create content for a tablet product?

How you can help right now

Your questions - Share your thoughts, comments and suggestions on the Poynter Eye-Tracking research page on Facebook and follow along there to learn more about what we’re learning.
Funding – The Knight Foundation and CCI Europe is helping kick in money, but the more funding, the more extensive research we can do. Please contact Sara about this at: squinn [at] poynter.org.

December 20, 2011
by Will Sullivan
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31,556,926 opportunities but a link blog ain’t one.

For me (and many others) the end of the year always is a time to reflect and think about the past and future. This year is no different; it’s been an amazing whirlwind of layered and sometimes overwhelming experiences with some of the most fantastic people I’ve ever met. From my RJI fellowship, election to the ONA board (and the plethora of committees and projects I’m tied to for that now), helping lead the SND St. Louis conference, and promotion to Director of Mobile News for Lee Enterprises just to name a few big projects, plus all my work helping co-direct the NPPA Multimedia Immersion workshop, teaching at more than a dozen universities, South by Southwest Interactive and other amazing conferences and workshops.

Looking back on it, it’s overwhelming and I learned an immense amount, especially about hyper-effective time management, closing deals, shipping product, finding chinks in the armor before battle begins and listening and learning from my intuition. But I also realized that I took on too much. I’m proud I didn’t renege on any of my commitments and delivered on my word while keeping all the plates spinning.

I was taught by my mom at an early age to always say, “Yes,” to opportunity and while the PCP addiction was hard to kick, I sure have some crazy stories and met a lot of interesting people. (I’m kidding, obviously. Most of the people were jerks.) I still love and face the day with that adventurous “say yes” spirit and I will continue to seek out new opportunities but I’ve also started to realize I’m mortal and need to focus on how I spend my finite time left on this earth.

So what’s that really mean?

Well, I’m going to have to start saying “no” to things more than I’d like. Maybe it’s the awkward nerd deep in side me, always wanting approval but that nerd has gotta evolve; I have too many half-finished books, to dos, napkin-sketched project ideas, half-coded sites and Read It Later stories that need to be dealt with. I’m going to continue working on industry projects as always (maybe not as many at the same time) and I also need to focus on some of my own projects with the same indomitable energy, razor-sharp focus and liberal time that I give to so many other people and organizations. I’m also going to seek out deeper, personal experiences with smaller, curated groups more frequently than massive, perfunctory popular events (I.e. hackathons and Hardly Strictly Young-type experiences, as opposed to mega-conferences and Facebook). There’s also this thing called “work-life balance” that evidently exists for some people? I think I’m going to try and check it out. I need to start travelling like I used to (and not just for weddings or conferences, board meetings and other work activities) and I have a handful of non-journalism projects I’m going to dive into. Perhaps, most of all, I need to take better care of myself.

Why are you telling me this?

Partially to make it official and hold myself accountable, but also because the net effect on Journerdism will be that I’m not really going to be doing the jambalaya links anymore and I hope that shift in time/focus will allow me to post original pieces more frequently (or at least more than the couple times I have over the past year).

There was a time back in the original “Carnival of Journalism” days (before the amazing David Cohn resurrected it from the grave) when there was just a few dozen voices in online journalism and even less curating mass journalism and tech links, when I aspired to be the techier Romenesko (as Matt Thompson described me to others). There’s now plenty of aggregation tools and curated content options out there with full-time, paid staff doing a better job that I could ever hope to in my spare time so I have to let that go, prune my RSS feeds and focus. If you’d like to check out quick hit links I’m reading, linking and commenting on, please follow me on Twitter.

So thanks for reading. I hope you’ll continue to do so and keep me in mind for interesting opportunities and ways we can make this world a better place, even if I’m not sending out links as frequently as I used to (it’s been a while though, so hopefully this is no surprise).

Onward and upward!
Will

October 27, 2011
by Will Sullivan
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E-Books offer an interesting opportunity for newspapers

This Oct. 27, 2011 blog post is mirrored from an internal site at Lee Enterprises, my current employer. I thought it might be handy to those outside the company too, so I’m cross-posting it here.

It’s easy to get caught up in all the razzle-dazzle of mobile and tablet apps when we think about new products, audiences and revenue opportunities but, we shouldn’t neglect or ignore the potential that e-books can offer also. Apps are great for providing utility and new technical products and functionality and e-books can compliment that by leveraging our core strength or what Jim Collins calls the “Hedgehog concept” in his book “Good to Great” by creating accurate, detailed, engaging local narrative content. E-books offer us the opportunity to repackage and resell a lot of our deep and valuable information in a digital format for rabid readers.

The Kindle platform, which works on just about every mobile, tablet or computer device, is especially intriguing, including their special category of “Kindle Singles” which Wired writer Charlie Sorrel described as, “one-off pieces of non-fiction and journalism which are typically much shorter than a novel, but longer than a magazine article.” The content can vary largely from single long-form narrative articles to combining a series of columns from a popular columnists into one digital document, or even a full-fledged narrative book built around a local topic, person/team or issue in the area (from the local mysterious murder case to the local team’s Cinderella climb to the championship).

Here are a handful of reasons why we should take a closer look at e-books and Kindle Singles for spreading our content:

E-books enable and create rabid reading habits, like crack addicts. The Wall Street Journal sites a study that says 40 percent of e-reader owners said they read more now than they did with print books. Anecdotally, I know this is true with myself and people I know who use e-readers, but even beyond e-reader users, the ability to always pick up any book I’m currently reading at at my current place on my phone, computer or tablet in any idle-time moment really helps feed a bibliophile’s addiction.
E-books are continuing to grow (up 153 percent in the past year). This will only grow exponentially as Amazon is launching the Kindle Fire tablet, the first what some are calling a serious competitor to the iPad. Their OS software is modified to showcase and feature your media content including books and movies. Amazon is actually selling the Kindle Fire at about a $10 loss per unit, hedging that the users will buy so many digital goods through them that they’ll make up the difference. Read Write Web declared eBooks as one of the top trends of 2010, pointing out: “At the end of October Amazon announced that for its top 10 best-selling books, customers bought the Kindle edition twice as often as the print copy. According to Amazon’s VP for Kindle, Steve Kessel, Kindle eBook sales also topped print sales of hardcovers and paperbacks for its top 25, top 100 and top 1,000 bestsellers.” Even the traditional university book presses are starting to publish ‘singles’ to take advantage of this new market and technology.
Potential audiences are huge; rather than just creating content for desktop users, or iPad or iPhone users, Kindle singles and e-books are available on almost all platforms so the potential audience is much larger.
Revenue can be substantially larger. Robert Niles illustrates this perfectly on the Online Journalism Review:

Here’s why you should consider amplifying your investment in eBook development. Here are the prices of the top 20 paid apps in the iOS app store, as of last night:

$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$2.99
$0.99
$0.99
$1.99
$1.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99

Now, here are the prices of the top 20 paid eBooks in Apple’s iBooks store, for comparison:

$9.99
$14.99
$12.99
$2.99
$12.99
$12.99
$0.99
$9.99
$12.99
$1.99
$12.99
$11.99
$14.99
$14.99
$12.99
$3.99
$14.99
$9.99
$12.99
$14.99

In which market would you rather try to make money?

Let’s sharpen the focus a bit. In the News category in the app store, most expensive paid app in the top 20 is Instapaper at $4.99. There is no News category in the iBooks store, but let’s use Politics & Current Events as the closest approximation. Of the top 20 paid eBooks in that category, 19 of the top 20 sell for $4.99 or more.

Clearly, the public is willing to – and does – pay more for content in eBooks than it does in apps. That fact should encourage any serious news business to take a serious look at eBooks.

E-reader owners also tend to be regular newspaper readers according to Scarborough Research, so they’re familiar with and trust our content and brands. So they will be easier to market new e-book products to through our existing properties.
E-books can help reach and target different audiences, a recent consumer research survey of 26,000 respondents found that women are 52 percent more likely than men to own an e-reader, and men are 24 percent more likely than women to own a tablet.
Save on publishing costs compared to traditional book publishing. Rather than having to go though book publishers for all the raw materials, e-books don’t cost any glue, paper or ink and depending on your product price, with Kindle eBooks up to 70% of the cost can go straight to the author/publisher. (Apple’s iBook store is another option, but it is much more restrictive, requiring an ISBN number for the book, which can cost more than a hundred dollars to register.)
Incredibly simple publishing process. Any block of text has the potential to become an e-book. The Kindle store can take formats from PDF, to Word Document, to ePub, to HTML and more. So any series of articles, or even a big Sunday feature story could be turned into a Kindle Single.
Added functionality and sharing are growing user benefits, from book sharing to note-taking and sharing to Amazon’s new HTML5-based format that allows for much more design and interactivity in e-books.

Here’s a handful of media organizations that have started to experiment with E-Books and Kindle Singles for various content types:

The Guardian has started offering Kindle e-book “Shorts” from some of their series/issue coverage, including breaking the News Corp phone hacking scandal for £2.29
The Chicago Tribune published the “Chicago Bears 2011″ which is literally a series of their training camp articles organized into topics for The Monsters of the Midway.
Ars Technica sold a 19-page, $5 Kindle e-book of their OS X 10.7 Lion review, and eclipsed 3,000 copies in the first 24 hours of the sale (Thanks to Chris Keller for the tip!)
The Boston Globe produced a series of books about historical crime and gangesters from their region, the most recent about Whitey Bulger.
The Washington Post created a $2.99 e-book about The Hunt for Bin Laden after his capture