TAKEAWAY: It is Australia this week for me, and a great deal of interest in news apps and how newspapers here begin to make the trek into tablet land. ALSO: Retro can be fun
This week in Australia: Part 1
My main reason for visiting Sydney, Australia, this week is to speak at the PANPA Future Forum
Conference (Aug. 18-19), but I will also conduct a series of workshops, conversations and presentations with various media companies, and a main theme of all these proceedings is about tablets and how to take their printed products to the new platform.
Although, all Australian metropolitan daily newspapers and metropolitan Sunday papers have tablet editions. The national newspapers do too. Most notable among them, the tablet editions of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age—both recently relaunched. I hope to have a chance to review them while here.
” Functionality and design is good and both are supported by launch sponsors as opposed a subscription.” says Tony Gillies, editor in chief, Australian Associated Press.
Tony also tells me that the regional dailies have been slower to move into tablet editions, which he says is “reflecting the development cost/tme versus the penetration of tablets into those smaller markets.”
In Tony’s view, regional newspapers will most likely opt for news and niche content apps for phones first as smartphone penetration is high.
In addition, and this is a fascinating fact, Tony tells me that the circulation of regional newspapers may some day mean it’d be viable to purchase a tablet for every one of their readers ( when unit prices inevitably come down) and forgo one or more of their printed editions during the week. “The print cost savings would be significant,” Tony says.“The key to tablet penetration in regional areas is a stronger, more reliable broadband network. Our government is planning a massive (and somewhat controversial) broadband network roll-out over the next five years.”
How about Australian magazines?
“Australian periodicals generally have been slower to embrace tablets. There have been good examples though, some of which are the Aussie versions of their US or European titles,” Tony says.
The Panpa Future Forum 2011 Conference
I like the title of the conference, as it includes the word “newspapers” and “passion” , two of my favorite. Under the Newspapers: Power & Passion title, one sees a series of sessions all of which reflect not only the mood of the Australian media, but globally. Some of these sessions are:
Greg Hywood, Chief Executive, Fairfax Media, Creating Our New Future in the Digital Content Era
Almar Latour, Editor-in-Chief, The Wall Street Journal Asia (Hong Kong) Global Success Story: How The Wall Street Journal Forged its Future
Earl J Wilkinson, Chief Executive, International Newsmedia Marketing Association (USA) ,Creating an Integrated Publishing Business – When Culture Comes Before Strategy
Dr. Judi MacCormick, Program Director, Australian Graduate School of Management, Embrace Change Without the Fear Factor
Mel Mansell, Editor, The Advertiser , Case Study: Leading the World in Newsroom Design for Journalism on Every Platform
James Ball, Data Journalist, The Guardian (UK) , New Frontier in the Newsroom – The Power of Data Journalism
Mario Garcia, Garcia Media (USA), Designs for the Integrated News Company – iPads, Print and More
Zac Skulander, Hegarty Scholar & Fairfax Media creative manager, It’s Advertising . . . But Not As We Know It. Cutting edge thinking at world’s best ad agencies
I plan to report with summaries of these sections during the conference.
Retro fun
What happens when a retro fun exercise reminds you of all the things you did for real: cropping photos with a grease pencil, using glue to paste together pages of a story, and, of course, typing on a typewriter. All these processes and “antiquities” which I remember as if it was yesterday——well, maybe not yesterday, but definitely last year!——were part of an experiment with a group of college students. I thank our avid blog reader, Alexandre Linhares Giesbrecht, for alerting us to this story.
Reading this funny take on how the students of today “struggled ” with the tools of yesterday brought back a rush of memories, as when I was a beginning intern at The Miami News, and would report to work at this afternoon daily at 5 am each morning. My first task was to assemble all the overnight sports results, or sports “agate” as it was referred to (small type). My first hour was me and my glue pot and sticky fingers as I pulled the paper off the UPI and AP machines and glued them together, until the glued pages snaked around my feet before going to a typesetter.
Then, in the second hour, as we got to page layout (or make up) we would start cropping photos with the grease pencils, putting marks on the corners where we wanted the photos to be cropped. More paper to shuffle around.
Finally, copy editing all the stories by hand, using those copyediting symbols that probably went the way of the Smith Corona typewriters.
And, while on the subject of copyediting, double checking facts required trips to the newspaper library, or the dictionary, or the Atlas. Oh, what a lifesaver that Google must be for the copy editors of today.
But, as I recall, we did get up more often to walk from here to there, which probably helped us stay trim and fit. Yes, we climbed stairs to go from newsroom to production and back several times in a morning.
This is timely, as my weekend blog post mentioned those grease pencils that are a part of the “the way it was” story I lead you to.
Headline: How to build a newsroom time machine
Introduction:
Want to freak out a newsroom full of college journalists?
Sit them down at manual typewriters and ask them to plunk “2011? onto a piece of paper.
They’ll only make it halfway.
Read about here:
http://journoterrorist.com/2011/08/02/paperball2/