All Things

I just left a comment on Rex Hammock’s blog rexblog, where he questions whether Marc Andreessen is right to say the demise of the New York Times is inevitable.

It’s probably safe to assume the Times will end up quite different from what it’s been in the past, which very well may upset a lot of folks, but that’s not to say it’s a doomed enterprise. I see two key issues to their survival: how willing are they to embrace new technology (& kill off the old when necessary) and - as I’ve already suggested - will they aggressively look for ways to combat information overload?

Marc Andreessen’s blog is certainly one of the best, nevertheless I’m not so sure it’s wise to write off the NY Times. They appear to be one of the few old-media companies that really seems to get the first requirement, embracing new technology, especially in the time since they became an early adopter of RSS.

Since then, they’ve added some video, made their content free, and now become an investor in Automattic (purveyor of WordPress). Besides, they’ve got a great global brand.

I recall someone arguing about a decade ago that as technology improves, most all colleges (as with textbooks) will end up using lectures by just a few star professors from top schools, that the internet would effectively raise the value of the top “global” brands, while lowering the value of most local brands.

I’m not sure if this is correct, but if so, it might seem to likewise apply to top media outlets, provided they were aggressive about adopting new technologies to spread their content. At the same time, all media players need to be looking hard at how to better package/deliver/archive their content, so that users can access and recall it as efficiently as possible.

Otherwise, the entire media biz is going to have a hard time growing, as we rapidly reach a limit to how much more information we can absorb in this new attention economy.

Business Week Senior Writer Stephen Baker has been soliciting comments for an upcoming story on blogging/web 2.0, and his summary of the responses so far is pretty much on the money.

My main concern, as noted earlier in Twitter & Taking Info Overload Seriously, is that information overload has ALREADY become a big problem, is rapidly becoming worse, and few media folks (or anyone else) are taking it seriously.

I remember back when USA Today started publishing, how it was criticized for publishing in a short-article format. Comparisions were made to TV news, with accusations of dumbing down complex issues. Some feared it would be the beginning of the end of serious journalism.

Well three decades later, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are still cranking out in-depth articles. These are now available to anyone in the world with internet access, so those fears were certainly exaggerated.

Nevertheless, while both have been aggressive adopters of internet technologies and online presence, they - and other media - may struggle financially if means aren’t developed to help us better find, track, and consume the information we need, and then suitably record/re-publish it. This is a critical business concern for the publishing and advertising industries.

While USA Today-type capsule summaries are one way of dealing with information overload, we also need to be able to manage effectively more in-depth information sources, too. There really is a rapidly-growing stream of valuable, specific content being produced now, and we’ll never really be satisfied with any solution that simply restricts, without helping us access, more of this content than we can currently.

Indeed, the continuing growth in the number of channels of information is staggering. We’re going to need powerful tools to manage that. There’s much more to be said about this, but what we really need is a vibrant conversation about how best to handle information overload. What’s the crux of the problem - how do we define it? What kinds of tools would be truly helpful?

Here’s the comment I left on Steve Baker’s blog:

Information overload is a BIG problem, and I’m amazed how little that reality has registered with most people and with journalists and other media folks.

The answer isn’t simply read less, because the availability of quality, specific and useful information (that you need or really want for your job, life, etc.) is exploding.

What’s missing are powerful tools to help us manage this information in a convenient, non-redundant and timely manner.

Information is coming in - and in the case of bloggers, flickr users, etc. going out - from so many directions that organizing/integrating all that is going to become a big aspect of social networking, and computing/telecom in general, in the near future.

Astroprof’s Page has an interesting discussion of the difficulties of science journalism.

I think the quality of science coverage is improving at many of the major newspapers at least. As Astroprof mentions, Mark Carreau has, for example, done a good job for the Houston Chronicle. Perhaps it’s a positive outcome from the Challenger tragedy, but it seems that about that time many of the media outlets here in Houston started giving a lot more attention to manned spaceflight. The “main” industries in Houston have long been oil & gas and real estate, but for quite a few years now space has also been accorded that sort of status by the Chronicle and several of the TV and radio stations.

An experienced, knowledgeable science reporter is hard to replace. I subscribed to Science News for years, but after Dietrick Thomsen and Jonathan Eberhart left, the physics and space coverage were just not the same. I doubt most publishers have the means to get into a bidding war for the limited supply of top talent, and no one could expect a relatively new science journalist to be able to match their reporting.

One of the problems with science and tech journalism is that folks in these fields often expect journalists to do all the work. Such a mindset would seem ridiculous in politics, where there’s whole staffs of hacks feeding carefully-crafted sound bites to the media and identifying “talking points” for their candidate’s every appearance.

Businesses likewise spend vast amounts on marketing and public relations, but most researchers, and even technical staff inside many businesses, somehow don’t seem to think these functions are part of their job. Of course, a lot of engineers, scientists and programmers aren’t that good at communications skills, or just plain don’t like to talk about themselves, but somebody in these research groups and engineering departments needs to take up the role of communicator, so the outside world can understand the value and needs of their efforts.

Journalists are under a lot of pressure with the kind of deadlines that most of us couldn’t even imagine, so it’s only smart to realize they’re going to need some help. That’s one of the things I’m trying to do with some of my sites, particularly AeroGo (for aerospace and engineering education) and RealCurrents (for current events), in which I’m trying to provide important but little-known background information and to point out things deserving more attention (which I generally categorize with the tag “Press Coverage Holes”).

Where there are failings in science/tech journalism, beyond just ignorantly trying to cover a field the reporter knows nothing about, I’d say that one of the biggest problems is that of naively swallowing pronouncements from big research groups without knowing what is going on elsewhere. We saw some of that a few years ago, for example, with some coverage of the Human Genome Project, that focussed too much on the government research, ignoring Celera Genomics’ private effort that ended up getting done first.

The result is that journalists are often lacking in understanding about the overall policy and business aspects of research, and consequently end up focussing too critically on superficial technical aspects. We saw that just this past week, when many media outlets were talking about the possible abandoning of the International Space Station, due to computer problems - what was a rather remote possibility, technically, while saying not a word about how NASA’s busily going about building a station they expect to abandon anyway, not too many years after completing it.

It seems to me that journalists ought to be a little easier on programs that suffer technical glitches that are really just part of the normal course of research & development, but be discerning enough to realize when an effort has really lost its way or when a policy has serious unresolved issues. With so much needless technical criticism, a lot of R&D managers are understandably gun-shy about the press, which just perpetuates the disconnect to journalists described above.

There’s a lot of things I like about Business Week, but one thing that really stands out is its unfailing promotion of the importance of industrial design and related creative disciplines to business. Every year, it sponsors (with the Industrial Designers Society of America) the Industrial Design Excellence Awards.

Now they are ratcheting things up another notch, as outlined in the August 1st issue, on using creativity as the centerpiece of a systematic strategy to build innovative companies. It seems the impetus for this new step is a firm conviction on the part of the BW editorial staff that the creative disciplines are key to American industry’s competitiveness in the global market. According to Editor-In-Chief Stephen J. Adler: “we’re saying … that innovation and design point the way out of a lot of the difficulties U.S. companies face as high-paying jobs in tech and manufacturing shift overseas.”

Beyond just an interesting issue on creativity, BW has added a new Innovation & Design Channel on its website. With this step, BW’s editorial staff continues to show unusual foresight (more on this later).

I hope they will continue to lead the way in breaking down the walls between corporate America and the vast body of research that is being done elsewhere, whether in academia, government, or a multitude of private efforts. As I noted in my last post, there are a lot of good ideas out there.

Having done R&D myself for the past 18 years, I know BW is just scratching the surface with the research covered in the August 1st issue. Progress has been rapid in many fields, especially in understanding the differences in how people think and work. Moving forward, I suspect one of the key issues in design and marketing will be determining when to focus like a laser on a particular kind of customer, and when to tailor a design to interface with users in multiple ways that appeal to a broader range of customers.

What we really need at this point is a more rigorous theory of design, which will not only help shore up industrial design’s public image but also make it possible to reliably sort out such issues. In the meantime, BW is to be commended for not letting the issue rest. American industry has a long history of discovering industrial design, turning around its decline, and then redeveloping amnesia about the whole field. With today’s global market, as the BW editors observe, this is no time to let this happen again.