The electronic embodiment of my brain farts.
I have been working on designing a new typeface.
This is definitely not a finished product. I haven’t thought about kerning, x height or anything like that yet. But sketches like this will help me get an idea of what my typeface will look like. I’m doing all capital lettes now, and then I’ll move on to lower case letters.
I’ll post updates as I make progress.
My attention was drawn to a graphic published in the New York Times yesterday concerning the state of newspapers. Not only does it show a graphical representation of the declining circulation of newspapers, but the bottom also shows which newspaper companies are losing the most money in terms of advertising revenue (the Chicago Tribune company is really hurting). Check out Media Owners if you want to find out what companies own what newspapers.
The other thing that I saw was that the Tuscon-Citizen is probably going to close it’s doors on March 21st unless they can find a surprise buyer. It hasn’t been around as long as some other dailies that are threatened (like the San Fransisco Chronicle and the Seattle P.I.), but it’s still sad to see a news daily go under.
Again, the challenges newspapers face are getting money from readers who expect to get their news for free and the getting the same amount of money from advertisers for their online content as they do with print media.
My roomate Sho attended a lecture the other day by Steven Asbury. Steven runs a design firm in Eugene, OR and specializes in print design, but also has valuable experience in maintaining professionalism in the office. Here are the 20 tips he shared with my roomate for remaining professional in the office (they’re aimed at designers, but anyone doing work in journalism can use these):
1. Drive can beat experience.
2. Smile – even when work/life sucks.
3. Be Switzerland (*1).
4. Double check everything.
5. Writers should get to know designers, and designers should get to know writers.
6. Pick your battles.
7. Designers and photographers… Read the stories before you begin.
8. Getting it right still beats getting it first.
9. Look beyond your own publication.
10. Keep a portfolio. Improve upon it constantly.
11. Never miss an opportunity to market yourself. Show your portfolio to anyone who will look.
12. Make contacts. Make contacts. Make contacts.
13. Be accountable for mistakes. Everyone makes them, and they’ll be forgotten much faster if you just admit that you screwed up and move on.
14. Don’t get caught in “the moat of suckiness (*2).”
15. Never bring dirty laundry to a job interview.
16. Know the industry. Read the blogs.
17. Keep track of job postings.
18. Be the answer person. Say “yes” a lot.
19. Solve any conflicts before you go home for the day.
20. Show enthusiasm at work by getting involved.
*1: Meaning: don’t take sides. If you take sides, it will later limit your work whether your side wins or loses.
*2: The moat of suckiness is where you and your fellows can freely enjoy criticizing other staff and the things you don’t like at the workplace. If you are stuck in there, you will be totally unproductive and losing lots of opportunities.
The Internet and today’s economy are calling to question the survivability of newspapers… but everyone already knows that. What everyone wants to know (including myself) is what are newspapers going to do to survive? Do they get rid of their print editions and focus on making their online versions profitable? Do they concentrate on advertising revenue (as current online media are), or do they find a way to get money from their readers?
Hoping to better understand the situation, I read three articles (recommended by my communication history instructor) and have posted what parts of each article were most insightful to me. These highlight the problems that newspapers face, and offer some direction as to where media needs to go:
Atlantic Magazine — End Times:
Print media brings in more money than online content. There is more space for advertising, and people pay for their newspapers. Online print is unable to utilize advertisements the way print media is (there just is not as much space on a web page for ads like there is on a newspaper page), and readers do not have to pay for online versions of newspapers in most cases.
The conundrum, of course, is that those 1 million print readers, who pay actual cash money for the privilege of consuming the paper, and who are worth about five figures a page to advertisers, are far more profitable than the 20 million unique Web users, who don’t and aren’t.
How do newspapers extract revenue from readers who already expect their content for free? And what can newspapers do to earn more revenue from their advertisers?
Time Magazine — How to Save Your Newspaper:
The Time Magazine article talks about the importance of generating revenue from the reader base is important. The writer (Walter Isaacson) argues that generating revenue from advertisements alone not only limits revenue, but it also jeopardizes the quality of the reporting.
In an advertising-only revenue model, the incentive is perverse. It is also self-defeating, because eventually you will weaken your bond with your readers if you do not feel directly dependent on them for your revenue.
Isaacson argues that it is possible to make money online from readers, and that charging them is not an absurd idea.
Back then there were a passel of online service companies, such as Prodigy, CompuServe, Delphi and AOL. They used to charge users for the minutes people spent online, and it was naturally in their interest to keep the users online for as long as possible. As a result, good content was valued.
[...]We invented things like banner ads that brought in a rising tide of revenue, but the upshot was that we abandoned getting paid for content.
The Daily Anchor (An editorial on the potential closing of the San Fransisco Chronicle):
They argue that newspapers that are losing revenue need to close (a libratarian perspective) and that print media is dying. This is a good thing, they argue, not just from an economic standpoint, but also from an environmental standpoint.
… if market forces are changing the way we receive media, then the market must adapt and evolve.
[...]Newspapers are limited. Static. Outdated the second they’re printed. Websites and blogs can publish articles in real-time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and be updated on the fly, even from a cell phone.
…I would wager that within the next 10 years, 85% of all print newspapers in operation today will be out of business or exclusively online. And you know what? They should go out of business. They’re dinosaurs, and the web is a meteorite/volcano/climate change/the best thing that’s happened since slice bread.
So what do newspapers need to do to survive? That’s the million dollar question, and that answer may be different for different newspapers.
If the New York Times, for example, can get each of its 20 million daily website visitors to pay $.05 each day they visit their site, they can make $1 million each day!
But that’s not going to work for papers whose online presence is small. Smaller daily newspapers probably do not have that option, and bigger dailies (such as the San Fransisco Chronicle) may not have enough time to create a large online following before they go out of business.
But as the Daily Anchor pointed out, there will likely be many fewer newspapers still printing by the time the whole financial fiasco is over. And that may be a good thing in terms of the environment and in terms of innovation.
I am interested to hear your thoughts on the subject. Feel free to leave a comment (or publish a response on your blog and link to it in the comments section). Look forward to hearing from you!
I know, I know. In an earlier post, I laid out exactly how picky I am when it comes to following different people, and now I’m following 2 people who followed me first. It seems hypocritical. What did they do to get me to follow them that was different than what everyone else does?
Simply put, these two people were interesting to me and they both engaged me. So I’m following them… for now. When two tweeters follow each other, it’s has gotta be because benefits are mutual between the two tweeters. Otherwise, they’re just wasting time.
I love tweeting events (except for the Oscars; I’m not a fan unfortunately). Not only is it fun to give my insight, it’s fun to read and respond to what other people are saying about the event. Especially if the person tweeting is actually present at the event.
One of the people I follow is @johnculberson, a republican representative from Texas. While I do not agree with a lot of what he says, I can always rely on his updates to get the mood and feel of Washington. Check out some of his tweets:
We are all reading thr official copy of speech and waiting – these lights are blinding
All our seats are first come first serve – we sit wherever we want – the Congressmen on the aisle got here real early
This is always an awe inspiring experience no matter who is President – we celebrate our Republic and our great institutions tonight
It’s a type of live reporting that you cannot get on your TV screen. Politicians with mobile devices that connect to twitter can give you a feel of the speech that no reporter can accurately duplicate. The same goes for the Oscars (although I don’t know of any celebs up for nomination who tweeted during the event).
The only thing I wished was that I had a group of politicians at the event grouped in a search bar so I could interact with more of what they were saying. That would be a new direction Twitter could go in: featured groups that aggregate the tweets of prominent people at an event that tweet (like tweeting congressmen and senators at the State of the Union) .
I found that tweeting from my iPod touch was the most effective way for me to watch the event and make updates and commentary. @johnculberson used TwitterBerry, which didn’t allow him to look at replies. I’m interested to find out how people tweeted from their computers (for example, if they watched it live of Cnn.com and had a client like tweet deck running in the background).
Tonight helped me realize that tweeting can make political events more democratic. It can give us a platform to interact with our politicians and political events, and it also provides a medium for us to voice our opinions to politicians that listen.
I decided to look at the history of Blogs, Twitter and social networking sites via Google Trends. Of course, there’s a lot of information about these, so analysis are not very in depth. Here is what I came up with:
1. Blogs
The term ‘blog’ was coined late in 1997, but the blogs that we know and recognize today evolved from online personal diaries. Some of the earliest bloggers in the ‘diary’ era were journalist who kept diaries of their reporting adventures. Open Diary and Live Journal were some of the earliest sites offering online blog hosting and software, and Open Diary is known as one of the first to allow other users to comment on people’s journals.
The graph above shows us that between 2004 and 2005, blogs (or Google searches for blogs, at least) became increasingly popular as they were slowly integrated into the mainstream. This is generally attributed to political activism, starting in 2002 with the the Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott scandal, where mainstream attention to some remarks made by Senator Lott was only given to the issue after bloggers started talking about it. From then on, blogs were used to sway political opinion, and they became increasingly popular during the 2004 election.
We can see that the popularity of blogs has leveled out, at least in terms of Google searches, since 2007.
2. Twitter
This graph shows twitter taking off in popularity around late 2008, and I suspect that this also has something to do with the recent presidential election. But this also probably is a result of people figuring out how to make twitter useful. The famous “Arrested” incident in Egypt and twitter’s usefulness in the Virginia Tech shooting both occured in 2007-2008, which garnished significant media coverage. I do know that in 2007, twitter had funding and downtime issues as a result of an increasing userbase.
3. Myspace and Facebook
Myspace is the blue line; Facebook is the red line.
This graph makes it pretty evident that in terms of searches, Facebook is much more popular than myspace. What this graph doesn’t tell is that the majority of searches for Facebook are outside the United States. In fact, the United States doesn’t even make it into the top 10 list for searches. Myspace, on the other hand, has the vast majority of it’s searches inside the United States, but even that statistic is declining. For me, it begs the question: “Does Myspace have a future in a Web 2.0 world?”
It’s fun to make analysis of Web 2.0 tools using statistics, but of course, search statistics can only give part of the picture when it comes to analysis. For more interesting material, check out the history of # hashtags in twitter (via Google Trends, of course) and the recent popularity of twitter’s follow friday.
Today is #followfriday!
It probably looks odd for me to celebrate Follow Friday, especially after I wrote an entry about me not following people back. And while it’s true that 103 people is hard for me to keep track of, I always have room for an interesting tweeter. I just don’t have enough room for another “social media expert.” I’m following a couple of those already, and their advice is more than enough for me.
So having said that, I’m eager to follow other people that cater to my interests, and I’m big on sharing my favorite tweeters with others.
There is, however, one type of tweeter that I will not follow, even if I am interested in them. Those are the tweeters that only tweet when they post new blog entries. We have a couple of those on my campus that try to follow me, and every once in a while I’ll get a blog or a newspaper following me on twitter.
I think that both of these types of accounts are redundant and I will not follow them. I can sign up for an RSS feed of a blog I like, and I know when to check most news papers for updates (for our on campus newspaper, it’s 12:30 a.m.).
That’s not to say I don’t follow bloggers who post their new blog entries on twitter (I’d be a hypocrit because I do this too). But if the blogger isn’t bringing anything new to my twitter feed that I can’t get on his blog (for example, a blogger that only tweets his blog posts), why would I follow that blogger?
So just to recap, Follow Friday can be good, and I feel that certain types of tweeters are unecessary to follow. Agree with what I said? Think I’m being too uptight with who I do and don’t follow? Feel free to leave feedback.
This song has been stuck in my head for the last 12 hours or so.
It’s hard to stay up
It’s been a long, long day
And you’ve got the sandman at your door.But hang on, leave the TV on
and let’s do it anyway.It’s okay.
You can always sleep through work tomorrow
Okay! Hey hey!
Tomorrow’s just your future yesterday. ”—Complete theme song from The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson
I really feel like I can identify with the lyrics.
