TAKEAWAY: It has been an exhilarating two days at the Poynter Institute as we conducted the two day Power of the Tablet conference. The 40-plus participants came from around the world, from Australia and Taiwan to Colombia and Norway. Their goal was the same: how can we prepare to take our publication to the next level—-the tablet edition. PLUS: Post-presentation interviews with Jennifer Brook of The New York Times and Roger Fidler of the Reynolds Journalism Institute.
The “Power of the Tablet” conference ends, but it is only the beginning
For two days, we sat around one of Poynter’s large classrooms as speakers led discussions on storytelling for the tablet, the technological challenges of transferring information from print and online to the tablet, the impoirtance of creative advertising for the new platform, as well as the economics of tablet editions, and producing content that users will be willing to pay for.
One sentence was heard often: Get there fast!
Indeed, publishers were urged to identify the one element of their newspaper or magazine that differentiates it and gives it its uniqueness, then proceed to tabletize with an app that introduces such content.
Designers were urged to keep things simple, local and personal.
Academics got examples of how the classroom can be fertile ground for creative projects leading to development of useful apps.
At the end, I was personally mesmerized by how much good and needed information had been disseminated in a two-day period.
But it is clear that many challenges lie ahead as newspapers transition to form the platform quartet of the future, where most publications will produce mobile, online, print and tablet editions.
What next?
We hope to complete the conference trilogy started with The Power of the Tablet and extend it to a full two-day conference on Storytelling (tentatively scheduled for March 2011), then a final one before the end of 2011 on Advertising/Revenue.
TheMarioBlog will continue to run tablet-related material through Friday.
Joe Zeff’s presentation
Fresh from the tablet conference, Joe Zeff has updated and expanded his presentation, “The Economics of the iPad.” Available at http://joezeffdesign.com/blog/?p=1235.
Transcripts of the “Power of the Tablet” liveblog
If you missed the conference or attended but want to revisit a favorite presentation, check out the transcripts from day one and day two.
Post-presentation interviews
While at the tablet conference, Reed Reibstein was able to interview several speakers, following up their presentations with one or two additional questions. We will present transcripts of these recorded interviews (except for Jennifer Brook’s, which was done before the voice recorder was available).
Jennifer Brook, Interaction Designer, The New York Times
In the first of our post-presentation interviews from the Power of the Tablet conference, I spoke to Jennifer Brook, Interaction Designer for The New York Times. In her presentation she discussed the importance of designing apps to conform to the standards of each platform. I asked her whether an aspiring app developer would then need to know all the different programming languages for each of the platforms. She responded that the issue is not so much about learning multiple languages as learning about the platforms’ distinct characteristics, their strengths and weaknesses. The iPhone Human Interface Guidelines, she noted, are great for figuring out how mobile apps should behave. But Brook said that the most illuminating activity is simply watching how people use their devices.
I also asked her about the use of columns in the New York Times Editors’ Choice iPad app. She said that columns are associated with a paging approach to navigation, as opposed to scrolling through the content. There are no hard and fast rules as to which is the best paradigm, she added. There is room for multiple approaches in designing mobile and tablet apps.
Roger Fidler, Program Director / Digital Publishing, Reynolds Journalism Institute
Question: My first question is, we’ve been talking about these four different devices, where you have a tablet, a cell phone, a PC, and print. So I was wondering whether you thought these are going to remain separate devices, or if at some point one or two of them will dominate as the major forms of information.
Roger Fidler: I think, in terms of the future, we’re clearly seeing a shift to digital, so I think print will become less and less dominant as people move more toward tablet devices, reading devices, and multimedia devices. Each platform has its own set of expectations. One of the dangers I see is newspapers, particularly, trying to create one thing for everything. That’s not going to work.
We really have to address that, for example, the iPad has expectations of a much more visually rich experience than either print or, to some extent, the web. The other platform—it’s really a fifth platform—is the e-reader, which is another category that newspapers are also trying to deal with, dealing with electronic paper technology. That will continue to evolve; it’s not going to go away just because of the iPad.
Question: But in your presentation, you mentioned cross-platform as a goal. How do you balance the two concerns, of tailoring the content to the device and making the content work everywhere?
Fidler: Cross-platform is the goal. You have to be able to provide your content and also content specific to individual devices as well. It can’t be just one set of content for everything. That’s a challenge for most media companies, because they’re trying to cut costs and not add additional staff to produce these different products. What I fear with the tablet, especially with newspapers, is, in the effort to automate and do everything with templates that are standardized, that the experience for readers will not be very compelling and that it will die out.
Cross-platform doesn’t mean the same for everything. You want content you can migrate across all these devices, but you also need to be able to adapt it and to add additional value on each of these different devices.