• CNN: World’s Best-Designed News Web Site (CNN.com) and World’s Best Designed News App (CNN for iPad)
• The Globe and Mail: World’s Best-Designed News Web site
• The Guardian for iPhone: World’s Best-Design Mobile App
• NPR for iPad: World’s Best-Designed News App

Back in March, the SND announced sixty other winners for individual project.

Originally posted at the Future Journalism Project.

Yesterday’s elections in Kenya are a story of triumph. The country, which had a terribly violent election season in 2007 turned in a sleek, peaceful set of returns this time. The referendum on a new constitution for the country returned a 67% yes vote. Why? In part, due to the real-time Web and mobile technology.

Time once was that video was a bit player in the online journalism experience. As traditional print publications moved online they didn’t have the human resources or technical infrastructure to create great video storytelling. Add a lack of bandwidth for viewers to actually enjoy video if it did exist and you see why the medium was slow to take hold.

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With today’s explosion of online video storytelling it’s hard to believe that reality existed until only a few years ago.

Craig Duff, Director of Multimedia at Time.com, is and has been a Web video proponent now for years. His goal is true storytelling adapted to the realities of the Web and mobile as a medium.

His strategy, he says, can be found in Pat Benatar lyrics: Hit me with your best shot.

In other words, tell us upfront what the story is about and show us what it’s really like to live with the facts and figures that underlie the news.

Craig and I spoke at Streaming Media East 2010. In the interview above he discusses Time.com’s video journalism strategy, producing content for new platforms such as the iPad and what the future of Web video journalism holds.

An archive of all interviews from that event can be found here.

Related posts:

1. Introducing the Future Journalism Project
2. The Present and Future of Cross Channel Video
3. The Future of Business Journalism

During the last half of 2009 approximately one quarter of US households used mobile phones instead of landlines, according to a study by the National Center for Health Statistics.

The trend towards household mobile has been going on for years. Take, for example, a survey size of me: I haven’t had a home landline in ten years or so.

Need a larger sample size? Here’s what the NHIS has to say:

The percentage of adults living in wireless-only households has also been increasing steadily [see Figure below]. During the last 6 months of 2009, more than two of every nine adults lived in wireless-only households. One year before that (i.e., during the last 6 months of 2008), 2 of every 11 adults lived in wireless-only households. And 2 years before that (i.e., during the last 6 months of 2006), only 2 of every 17 adults lived in wireless-only households.

The percentage of children living in wireless-only households is also growing. In fact, for this population, the 4.6-percentage-point increase from the first 6 months of 2009 is the largest 6-month increase observed since 2003, when NHIS began collecting data on children living in wireless-only households.

And for the visually inclined, the NHIS provides the following handy timeline:

Source: CDC/NHIS

Other eye-catching statistics from the research shows that 49% of adults aged 25-29 live in a mobile-only home, while 30% of all US Hispanics are cellphone only.

While the landline to mobile trend will continuously affect how we communicate, receive and share information, more interesting — and more profound — is an analysis by the Pew Research Center.

It seems that pollsters and other surveyors of national life generally rely on the traditional telephone to conduct their research. It’s simply much less expensive to do so. As Pew points out, with large numbers of US household now off the landline grid, “non-coverage bias” creeps into polls of all sorts.

From Pew:

For some estimates, even a small amount of bias may have important substantive consequences for the political or social implications of the research. Since the decline of landline coverage has not been uniform across demographic groups, non-coverage bias among certain subgroups may be even larger than for the full sample. As a result, some key subgroups in surveys based only on landlines may be severely underrepresented.

Since we’re in an election year, let’s look at two political polls and how they effect news coverage.

• In polls of landline users only, Republicans lead generic horse races. Once cellular-only adults are included, these races become dead heats.
• When sampling both cellular and landline users, more people approve of President Obama’s performance than disapprove. Limit the poll to landline users and equal numbers approve and disapprove.

Polls drive political coverage and in general most polls referenced by major media exclude the mobile-only population. Pew shows that such exclusion has a significant effect on overall results which in turn shapes the news narratives we see bandied about as accepted wisdom.

With the mobile-only trend growing, it appears that “reality-based” coverage of our civic and political life will grow more skewed with large segments of the population unaccounted for.

How to prevent that? It’s a matter of dollars and cents. Money that pollsters are well advised to spend.

About Landline, Meet Dinosaur

This article originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org.

Please visit the original to rant, rave or otherwise discuss.

Screencast from Adobe’s new ad campaign

It’s been a few weeks since Steve Jobs wrote his public broadside against Adobe generally and Flash in particular.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen countered via the Wall Street Journal, calling Apple’s technological objections to Flash “a smokescreen.”

What’s missing though is why this, why now? What’s going on that a tiff between two technology giants should become so public? Usually the war of words occurs between the fanboys on each side. Public words of attrition by respective CEO’s? Not so much.

The technologist Charles Stross provides good insight into the matter. Simply, he writes, Jobs is betting the Apple farm that the future is not just mobile, but handheld or tablet in general:

Apple are trying desperately to force the growth of a new ecosystem — one that rivals the 26-year-old Macintosh environment — to maturity in five years flat. That’s the time scale in which they expect the cloud computing revolution to flatten the existing PC industry. Unless they can turn themselves into an entirely different kind of corporation by 2015 Apple is doomed to the same irrelevance as the rest of the PC industry — interchangable suppliers of commodity equipment assembled on a shoestring budget with negligable profit. [emphasis his]

While Stross believes wired broadband is generally too expensive to improve leaps and bounds, wireless broadband isn’t and will. With 4G just around the corner and hardware becoming increasingly commoditized, Stross looks five years out to predict that the industry will be mostly mobile and mostly in the cloud. Control that cloud, or control the apps being served from it and your company has a business model. Don’t and, well, you had a nice run while it lasted.

This is where the Apple and Adobe hand to hand combat begins. It’s a turf war over the application portion of a cloud ecosystem each wishes to control.

Which brings us back to Adobe, and a new campaign that fires back at Jobs’ contention that the company creates closed, proprietary software incompatible with the future internet.

From the BBC:

Adobe has launched its latest salvo in an ongoing dispute with Apple.

The co-founders of Adobe have published an open letter in which they say that Apple threatens to “undermine the next chapter of the web”.

The software firm has also started an adverting blitz in newspapers and on popular technology news sites.

Ads like the one I captured in the video above are appearing online at sites like Wired and Techcrunch. Offline, they’re appearing in the New York Times, Washington Post and Financial Times among others.

The fun though is in the Any Letter You Can Write We Can Write Better department. Adobe co-founders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock play on Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash to pen, Our Thoughts on Open Markets.

Apple, they write, is undermining “the next chapter of the Web” by keeping their app garden closed to third party development kits. Adobe, of course, creates just such kits with Flash and Flex.

We believe that consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content and applications, regardless of what computer they have, what browser they like, or what device suits their needs.

No company – no matter how big or how creative – should dictate what you can create, how you create it, or what you can experience on the web.

The issues here are many and the irony is that while both companies are closed and proprietary, each is trying to stake their claim to the open Internet that has brought us so far.

The opening salvos have been fired. We look forward to seeing the turf wars head next.

About Adobe Strikes Back

This article originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org.

Please visit the original to rant, rave or otherwise discuss.

Under shadow of the holidays, Google launched Product Ideas for Google Mobile, joining a number of on- and offline firms that crowd source product development to tune it to market demand. In Google’s case, Users suggest ideas for Google mobile app development, other Users vote on them and maybe, perhaps, Google engineers will make it so.

And the bucket load of loot you get if your great idea is chosen? Not happening. But the geek prestige? Priceless.