Author: Megan Jonas

Newsstand: What I wish it did

I’ve had a little over a week to look over the new iOS on my iPad.  Not surprisingly, I am using the Newsstand app more than any of the other new features (although we had a really fun time on Friday locating a colleague’s iPhone on the new iCloud – turns out, it was in her bag the whole time).  Newsstand is a feature that has been a long time coming, and as such, it was probably at least slightly over-hyped.

Since we’re working on a magazine project this quarter, I am a big fan of the background downloading.  Prior to the new OS, it would often take me 10 minutes or more to download each new issue of each magazine.  Now, they download as they become available, without needing to have the app open.  For anyone who was using magazine apps before the change, this feature seems intuitive and easy to use.  I do wish, however, that the Newsstand app had it’s own settings that over-rode the individual app settings.  That way, I wouldn’t have to opt-in to every app’s background download.

CNET’s Scott Stein agrees.  “Newsstand was one of the iOS 5 features that I’d been long awaiting, because I dreamed it would be a way of integrating books, periodicals, and all reading material into one destination. Alas, that’s not the case here.”

He argues that the ideal location for his Newsstand apps would be inside of the iBooks app, so that he could keep all of his reading together.

I was also hoping that Newsstand would make it easy to manage my subscriptions.  I have subscribed to a number of magazines on the iPad for which I do not have print subscriptions.  For some of these subscriptions, I chose a monthly fee, because I needed the magazine only for this quarter while I worked on the project, or because I wasn’t sure I would enjoy the magazine.  For some subscriptions, I chose the yearly subscription, knowing I would want to read the magazine long after the project.  Still other magazines are single issue downloads.  I was really hoping that the Newsstand would allow me to easily see this information, but I still have to log in to my iTunes account to figure this out.

Gizmodo, on the other hand, finds Newsstand “more awesome than it seems.”  The tech news site loved how the app allows them to see the covers of the issues instead of a generic app icon.  It is easier to know if new issues are available.

I wish that all of my magazine apps were supported in the Newsstand.  Currently, I have several other magazines in various groupings on multiple pages.  Before the new OS update, all of my magazines were grouped together, which I found exceedingly convenient, and I’ll have to wait until that can happen again before I can truly evaluate the system.

A focus group of one

Seven days ago, Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs died at 56 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.  Apple fans across the world showed love and support for the man, the brand, and his family, often through a medium that Jobs himself was responsible either for creating or for promoting.

I was down on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue on Sunday to one, buy a suit for interviewing, and two, shoot some photos for photojournalism, and came across an Apple Store covered in multi-colored Post-Its with messages for Jobs and his family.  And one-by-one people walked up, left a message on the wall or an apple on the ground, snapped a photo with their iPhone, and went on their way.

Jobs was not a fan of focus groups, audience research or user testing.  I am also not a fan of those things.  He believed that often with groundbreaking technology people had no idea what they wanted until you told them what was possible.  He was, among other things, an excellent salesman of the possible.

I, on the other hand, simply do not like conducting these interviews.  It’s not that I don’t see their value, although I do challenge the audience Kool-aid that says that we should simply ask people what they want and then give it to them.

In journalism school, it is expected that students inherently know how to talk to people about a product that they are working on.  They’re supposed to know exactly how to express a sense of empathy and immediately build a rapport with random strangers who the journalists are supposed to miraculously find on street corners and in coffee shops and convince to dedicate 20 minutes of their lives to answering a journalist’s prying questions about their lives.  Professors and administrators do not seem to see that there is a difference between this type of interviewing and interviewing someone for a story.

Audience research is very, very good at finding out what people like and how they behave.  Unfortunately, even the first man who bought an iPad has only been using it for fewer than 2 years.  And his world of experience is limited to the type of apps and interactivity that a small group of developers has been able to dream up.  And of that very small group, only a very few of those are doing any sort of groundbreaking work, while the others are using their innovations to display content.  So, essentially, the ideas of a couple of men and women are the sum of iPad experiences that exist.  And asking an iPad user what they like can only encompass those ideas.

We can ask people to imagine what they would like, but they will still be limited to their experience of interacting with the device.  Even the truly visionary random man on the street might suggest something that we couldn’t possibly execute.

We’re warned about the dangers of the “focus group of one:” essentially using only your own experience to make decisions.  We’re especially warned about that in our class.  As a group of 13 girls and one boy, we have chosen to create a magazine for men.  As a group of 23 to 28-year-olds, we’ve chosen men age 35-55, which for most of us means neither our friends nor our fathers.

And so, if you need me on Saturday, I’ll be hanging out at a Starbucks in Skokie, stalking men with iPads and asking to see some ID.

…And it’s shiny

As some of you may know, this quarter I’m working on developing an iPad-native magazine.  Because the iPad is so new, it presents a unique challenge.  Basically, the only thing we know about iPad users are their basic demographics and that, for the most part, they don’t really know how they’re using the tablet.  What I mean is, iPad users don’t know if they want interactivity or static pages, they don’t know if they want videos to autoplay or to wait for their cue, and they certainly don’t know what an iPad magazine should look like.

Which should make our job really easy, right?

Just take the best of what is out there, and combine it into something shiny and new, and there you go: an iPad magazine.

Except that it’s hard to start without a starting point.

Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs has a philosophy regarding user testing.  To paraphrase: people don’t have any idea what they want until we tell them that they want it.  I like this for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it would mean I don’t have to stalk iPad users in coffee shops to ask them to do a “card-sorting” activity, whatever that is.  What I really like though is the idea that, while subject and tone can be determined by audience interviews and market research, the way it is all packaged and presented may not even exist yet.  And instead of asking people what they like, which, inevitably, will be limited to what they’ve already experienced, we can tell people what they’re going to like a year from now by dreaming up something people didn’t even know they wanted (ahem, iPod).

There is also this intangible quality that the iPad has by virtue of its newness.  Everything that is created for it right now is cool and innovative.  We’re just on the cusp of that no longer being the case, the point at which people have enough experience with this shiny new toy to know what they like, and more importantly, what they don’t.

But right now, in this moment (or at least the moment that lasts between now and Christmas), why not tell people what they like and need in an iPad magazine and shift the conversation that is happening around this new device?

One thing ends, another begins

In the last month, I wrapped up one project, spent three weeks traveling up the East Coast, and then started a new project.

Our summer project, “A Parent’s Quest”, is finally live.  It was a taxing last few weeks, but I’m really proud of the work we’ve come up with.  I learned a lot about education reporting and I hope that we avoided some of the pitfalls that exist in that rich subject.

I was supposed to leave the next day to visit friends in Washington, D.C., but a hurricane had other ideas.  When I finally got there on Monday, it was sunny and warm and I got to spend some time with good friends.  I then embarked upon an Amtrak odyssey up the coast, hitting Philadelphia, New York, and Boston and seeing friends along the way.  I left Chicago on a warm August afternoon.  When I finally got back, it was definitely fall.

Now in my final quarter of graduate school, we’re taking on what might be the most exciting project I’ve ever done.  We’re going to create a tablet-first app using Bonnier Corporation’s recently spun-off Mag+ platform.  It’s been an exciting week and a half so far, and I’m really looking forward to digging in.  We’re going to tackle a history themed publication with a hip, pop-culture angle.  All of this, we hope to accomplish in 12 weeks.

So it’s going to be a busy fall…

Hello, Tech Support?

When I worked at a traditional television network, there were two kinds of tech support.

Our IT guys worked primarily on our regular desktop computers, installing programs, updating systems, and setting up our Blackberries (I had three in the course of two years).

Our engineering staff worked on all of the servers, transponders, and other mess of wiring behind master control which actually made the network go up to the satellite and back down to cable systems across the country.  These guys were amazing.  I could give them incomplete coordinates for a satellite feed that I needed, like, five minutes ago and they’d find it, downlink it, and get it on the air.

Now that I’m working on a website, I find myself in need of an additional brand of tech support.  Video for TV and video for the web are two very different animals.  The shooting and editing are the same, but the encoding, uploading, and display seem to be a never ending headache.

We decided early on that we were going to build an HTML5 compatible site, with all of the bells and whistles.  Unfortunately, the video standards are -not- standard, and trying to balance quality with file size is becoming a huge headache.  We’re also working from a WordPress CMS, in the interest of ease for those colleagues who are not web people, but we’re finding the quirks of the system to be a little constraining.

Oh, and did I mention that we’re supposed to be live in 24-hours?

It’s going to be a long day, but when it’s over (probably Tuesday or Wednesday) we’re going to have a site up at Northwestern’s News 21.  Wish me luck.

When reporters became brands (and other signs of the impending armageddon)

It may seem strange that I am writing a post about the shameless self-promotion that many journalists (especially those of my generation) engage in on a regular basis on the very day that I published my own resume website, but this is a topic where I seem to have a particularly crotchety point of view.

From your “social media presence” to “building your brand,” the buzz words of marketing run rampant through journalism schools and the trade press.  There was a day when this sort of self-interested promotion was exercised by only the most vain of television news personalities, but now, it is seen as the only way to make oneself relevant in the changing journalism world.

I have always been a “let my work speak for itself” kind of person and am generally uncomfortable with the level of marketing that journalists are expected to do in the name of becoming a valuable asset to a news organization.  I thought, for a time, that this kind of personal branding was a reaction to the steep decline in journalism jobs, but now I see it more as a result of the “cult of celebrity” that has taken over popular culture.

In a world where you can be famous for being famous (or rather for doing very little of any value), it is not surprising that journalism schools are focused on creating their own little celebrities whose personalities, rather than talent, will earn them a job.

I still have hope that there is a market for journalists who are doing good work without seeking to create their own 140 character caricature that can be easily marketed by the ad department.  At many of the nations highest pinnacles of journalism – the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC Nightly News – there are old-school news hounds looking to ply their craft in relative anonymity.

A colleague of mine at school had a class assignment for a course called “21st Century Media.”  She was to choose a journalist and ask them about their “brand.”  She chose a favorite of mine, Gene Weingarten, a curmudgeonly columnist (and Pulitzer Prize winner) for the Washington Post Magazine.  His response, and the column that resulted, pretty well sums up how I feel about the movement.

And while I feel a little concerned that my professional philosophy tends to line up closer with the reporters of my father’s generation, I am comforted by the fact that, for now at least, those are the people who still hold the hiring power.

So, check out the website (still a work in progress, but maybe now that real people can look at it, it will light a fire under me to complete the features on my to-do list) and let me know what you think.  As for my “personal brand,” is “Female Gene Weingarten” taken?

My bags are packed…

Traveling for work can be work in and of itself, but there’s nothing like showing up at a school or a parking lot with a camera and a tripod in the back of my car, ready to tell a story that I (or my editor) thought so important that I traveled across the country to tell it.

Last week, I spent four days in the southern tip of Texas, working with a colleague on a story about educating migrant laborers and their children. We probably drove around 1,000 miles all around this school district interviewing school officials, students, and one particular success story; a student who had migrated from Texas to Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan for more than 10 years during his childhood who is now slated to graduate from Michigan State University next spring.

As a journalist, I can sit at my desk and do all the research in the world, but nothing compares to actually going out and talking to the people I’m reporting about. There is something intangible about seeing these people in their natural surroundings, rather than interviewing them over the phone. And since I lean towards visual journalism, it’s necessary.

This coming week, I’ll be in Boston and Denver working on a story about school choice and how parents and educators are helping students navigate the increasingly complex world of public education. And, in addition to the mediocre hotels and (sometimes) worse food, I hope that being there, and seeing the worlds of educators, parents, and other interested parties will help me to tell a story that is both informative and interesting, in a way that reporting from my desk never could.

#oneman’spound #isanotherman’shashtag

Twitter has released a handbook for journalists.  It’s goal?  To make using Twitter easier for reporters, producers, and other journalists who use the micro-blogging site to inform their work.

Twitter for Newsrooms features sections like “report” and “engage.” When I first saw the site, I was excited to learn that Twitter has finally realized that a large portion of their content is tweeted, or retweeted, by journalists, and that they were seeking to make things easier for those of us who are starting to use the social network for source-building and storytelling.

It seems that the guide has very little to offer the journalist who is already twitter-literate, however. Which is not to say that it can’t be a valuable resource for new journalists, or for journalists who are nostalgic for the days when they used typewriters and, using a land line phone, called their editors and read their copy to a typist back at the bureau.

The thing I like most about the guide is how simple it is, and how easy I think it might be for someone like those grizzled old scribblers to understand. It’s value lies in teaching both the new to Twitter and the new to journalism how best to use the site in an ethical and straightforward way.

How do you use Twitter?

Coming next week: A bit of shameless self-promotion and a rant about the need for self-promotion.

A new look at learning

I’m about two weeks in on a new fellowship that aims to look at how education is (or, more likely, is not) preparing today’s kids for tomorrow’s world.  We’re running with the idea that STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) is the answer.

I approach this topic with some apprehension.  Education seems to be one of the most widely parsed topics in mainstream news today.  When Newsweek and NBC News are doing special features, it seems that the ship has sailed on innovative coverage.  We also struggle with the fact that, rather than publishing as we go, we will report for 10 weeks and publish at the very end.  We’ve already had two reporters pitch stories that were covered by major news organizations a few days later.

We are hoping to use the delayed release as a benefit, however, by delving deep into topics and placing a premium on visual and interactive elements that need some lead-up time to build.

I’ll be posting additional updates as we work throughout the summer, but please feel free to let me know what your ideas are about the topic in the comments section below.

Tweet your politician

Tweet your politician

On Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, scores of fresh-faced young people sit behind desks jammed into entryways and hallways in congressional offices answering phones.  These intrepid congressional aides answer calls about passports and capitol tours, jobs for the unemployed and affordable energy for the elderly.

The U.S. Constitution states that any citizen has the right to petition the government for “a redress of grievances,” and, largely, that is what these people are doing.

But there’s a new game in town when it comes to contacting your congressman, and, indeed, the President.

The White House announced last week a new Director of Progressive Media and Online Response, Jesse Lee.  Lee will, essentially, patrol Twitter to address problems and quash negative stories on a grassroots level.

Many businesses have already employed this approach, from airlines to packaged foods, with varying levels of success, but what this move suggests to me is that the Obama administration is moving towards more and more direct conversation with constituents, and they’re not the only one.

According to Tweet Congress, a site dedicated to aggregating Twitter feeds from members of congress and the media that cover them, 387 members of congress are using the micro-blogging platform, including the current and former Speakers of the House and 2008 Republican Presidential Nominee John McCain.

So in the future, instead of “call your congressman” will the grassroots organizer’s rallying cry be “tweet your senator?”  Maybe not, but, when done effectively, a twitter account can be an excellent way for government officials to have two-way communication with their constituents.

To be effective, the politicians (or, more likely, their aides), will have to use Twitter less as a medium to broadcast their policy positions and public events, and more as a two-way conversation about issues and a rapid-response mechanism for urgent constituent demands.

For example, a citizen might tweet at their congressman that they are having a problem with their social security benefits.  That congressman should immediately follow up, get more details, including contact information, and then work to solve the problem.  A happy constituent would be likely to tweet about their success with this process, creating goodwill for the congressman in return.  (This is very much like the way that airlines are dealing with disgruntled passengers who tweet their displeasure at delays and cancellations, or even just bad service).

But this level of accessibility and interactivity is a double-edged sword.  If the congressman is not able to solve the problem, or simple uses Twitter as a broadcast medium rather than a conversation, savvy followers will let him know that he’s not serving their needs.  Depending on the magnitude of his following, this could result in problems come election time.

So, are politicians on social media a good thing?  In general, I think so, especially if it means they are more accessible to the people they were elected to serve.  But they better have some smart, responsive people working the back end, or we may just hear about the politician that was fired by Twitter.

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