Jeff Jarvis on a shared Google pressroom

Another interesting article from today's Guardian, again this was something that I mentioned on the Graphics blog. One of the problems with this idea of death of print or death of newspapers is that online media doesn't alter the content(well it can do if you read Charlie Brookers article), the content isn't dying- the medium is. The journalistic quality of The Guardian is still there and online media can allow newspapers to expand in new ways. Links, blogs feeds, comments, videos and so on.

The Host with the Most

Newspapers are in the wrong businesses. They should no longer be in manufacturing and distribution, which have become cost-heavy yokes. And they should no longer try to be in the technology business - because they're bad at it. When I said this on my blog, Bob Wyman, a technology entrepreneur now at Google, commented that technology infrastructure "is a cost of doing business. It is not a thing of value." So I asked him whether Google should fulfil Roussel's vision as a paper's new pressroom.

A shared platform for news organisations wouldn't be anticompetitive: it would be pro-efficiency. If any paper, station or site could pluck software from the cloud and freely use and adapt it to perform essential functions then it could concentrate its resources on what matters - journalism.

Online POKER marketing could spell the NAKED end of VIAGRA journalism as we LOHAN know it

Charlie Brooker article in todays Guardian

It's a funny article but raises some interesting points. There's a relevance to the discussion we had on the Graphics site the other week about the death of print. If publishers are generating revenue through advertising, is this a knock on effect and how does it effect content?

And wait, it gets worse. These phrases don't just get lobbed in willy-nilly. No. A lot of care and attention goes into their placement. Apparently the average reader quickly scans each page in an "F-pattern": reading along the top first, then glancing halfway along the line below, before skimming their eye downward along the left-hand side. If there's nothing of interest within that golden "F" zone, he or she will quickly clear off elsewhere.

Which means your modern journalist is expected not only to shoehorn all manner of hot phraseology into their copy, but to try and position it all in precisely the right place. That's an alarming quantity of unnecessary shit to hold in your head while trying to write a piece about the unions. Sorry, SEXUAL unions. Mainly, though, it's just plain undignified: turning the journalist into the equivalent of a reality TV wannabe who turns up to the auditions in a gaudy fluorescent thong in a desperate bid to be noticed.

The F Pattern idea is interesting
Link

* Users won't read your text thoroughly in a word-by-word manner. Exhaustive reading is rare, especially when prospective customers are conducting their initial research to compile a shortlist of vendors. Yes, some people will read more, but most won't.
* The first two paragraphs must state the most important information. There's some hope that users will actually read this material, though they'll probably read more of the first paragraph than the second.
* Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words that users will notice when scanning down the left side of your content in the final stem of their F-behavior.
* They'll read the third word on a line much less often than the first two words.

Blended distribution :)

Awesome, NOISE Peter Saville video being used to back up an argument on this forum

This stands as a sketch for the future.

This stands as a sketch for the future.
MURIEL COOPER and the VISIBLE LANGUAGE
WORKSHOP
By David Reinfurt

"Muriel Cooper always sought more responsive systems
of design and production, emphasizing quicker feedback
loops between thinking and making, often blurring
the distinction between the two. As a result, she always
left room for the reader. This text is an attempt to do
the same."

link

Muriel Cooper

This is really amazing stuff, Mark posted a quote about her Bahaus movie on the Graphics blog. Whenever I find things like this I think a couple of things, one I'm not alone, two am I really stupid and why haven't I read this before.

"she was beginning to grapple with the converse: how to translate an interactive experience with a computer onto paper, "without just dumping"—an area known technically as "transcoding." In other words: how to turn time into space.

"Electronic is malleable. Print is rigid," she told me, then backtracked in characteristic fashion. "I guess I'm never sure that print is truly linear: it's more a simultaneous medium. Designers know a lot about how to control perception, how to present information in some way that helps you find what you need, or what it is they think you nee. Information is only useful when it can be understood."

http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/medalist-murielcooper

http://www.adcglobal.org/archive/hof/2004/?id=5

Another great quote from her

“What is this new medium? In general its outstanding characteristics are dynamic in real time, interactive, incredibly malleable, some capability of learning and adapting to the user, or to information, or to some other set of relationships. Our goal is to make information into some form of communication… Information by itself does not have the level of ‘filtering’ that design brings to it.”

I wish I had a date for that quote, it's at least 15 years ago.