I was in San Francisco earlier this month working on the Future Journalism Project. This is a multiplatform documentary we recently announced.

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Funny though, as I begin shooting interviews and talking to people, opportunities begin to expand. Or at least ideas of what’s possible do.

Before heading to San Francisco, the idea behind the Future Journalism Project was to create a feature length documentary and a Web site that holds all the source footage so that those interested can watch interviews with those we film in their entirety.

Now that I’m back and have discussed the project with ScribeLabs and producers here at ScribeMedia, we’re beginning to recognize that the opportunities are so much more.

Here’s what we’re now thinking. In addition to producing a traditional documentary, we want to explore the possible. This includes:

• Dedicated Web Site: the Future Journalism Project Web site will hold video of all interviews conducted. Each interview will be edited down to a series of 4-6 minute segments organized by subject matter and presented in an interface similar to video-centric sites such as YouTube, Hulu and TED. The goal is to let site visitors explore the ideas of individuals and also dive deeply into specific topics as discussed from a variety of perspectives. Mechanisms for community interactions and content submissions will be in place so that these interviews seed an ongoing conversation.
• Podcast Series: Each Future Journalism Project interview conducted by the producers will be made available and presented in its entirety as an audio podcast. Listeners can subscribe to the entire series or download podcasts with the interviewees they are most interested in hearing from.
• The Book: A book of essays written by leading thinkers is planned to accompany the project. The subjects and themes explored will echo and expand upon the video content, with authors focusing on Journalism Education, Journalism Business Models, Changing Journalism Practices and Journalism and Democracy.

  The book will appear in both print and digital versions.

This may sound obnoxiously aspirational but the truth of the matter is that in this day and age there’s really no reason that the above shouldn’t be seen as starting points with pretty much any enterprise reporting activity, documentaries most definitely included.

With the technologies and services available to us it’s really just a matter of opening our minds to the possible and seizing opportunities as they present themselves.

Gear & Gadgets

Our San Francisco Gear Included:
• Camera: Sony EX1
• Lights: Lowel Tota-Lights
• Editing: Final Cut
• Filters: Red Giant
• Audio: Soundtrack Pro 
• Sound Design: Reason
 

What I’m doing may be near and dear to my heart but in the end it’s simply content. Open source platforms such as WordPress and Drupal will let me organize it, video service providers like Vimeo and Blip will let me present it, on demand publishers like Lulu will let me create books about it, iTunes lets me podcast it, Creative Commons lets me license it. Really, what more could a producer ask for?

These are the conversations we’re having back at the Labs, conversations guided by the opportunity of digital possibility.

That said, I hope you follow this project for two distinct reasons: one, journalism in the United States is at a crossroads and we hope to provide fodder for discussion and, two, our very open business model is something we believe in and think is applicable across most subject matter.

The video above include a fraction of the ideas we captured in San Francisco. Stay tuned as we continue our explorations.

About the Interviewees

While not everyone we talked to appear in the above video, in order of appearance those that do are:

• Dave Cohn: Founder, Spot.us.
• Dan Gillmor: Director, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
• Ted Glasser: Professor of Communication, Stanford University. Co-author, Custodians of Conscience: Investigative Journalism and Public Virtue.
• Richard Gingras: CEO, Salon Media Group.
• Gabriel Sama: 2010 Knight Journalism Fellow, Stanford University.
• Mark Luckie: Multimedia Producer, Center for Investigative Reporting. Creator, 10,000 Words.

Links go to a their Web sites and/or biographies.

Cover image: San Francisco Spectator by VancityAllie via Creative Commons/Flickr.

About San Francisco Postcard from the FJP

This article originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org.

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

GQ iPad sales figures came out the other day. They’re a bit confused. Initial reports read that 365 December “Men of the Year” iPad issue were sold. Later, VentureBeat clarified and wrote that 52,000 GQ Apple apps sold since December.

It’s a long way from 365 to 52,000 and as VentureBeat points out, GQ publisher Condé Nast doesn’t have a breakdown of which apps sold on which device. Meaning, Apple doesn’t provide analytics for anyone — let alone the publisher — to know whether they’re having success on the iPad or iPhone/Touch. This is a problem of course, and one that mobile analytics provider Flurry tries to reconcile.

But while 365 might be low, the iPad as magazine delivery system isn’t going to be the publishing savior hyped by hopeful insiders over the past few months. It’s been said before and is worth saying again: thinking a device saves an industry is a losing proposition.

Outside the novelty factor, few consumers who’ve left print for the Web are going to start paying for a magazine just because it’s on a new form factor. Once the novelty wears off, readers will settle back in where the content is free.

And while novelty can add incremental income, incremental income isn’t significant income. Listen to what GQ VP/Publisher Pete Hunsinger told the magazine trade publication min, “This costs us nothing extra: no printing or postage. Everything is profit, and I look forward to the time when iPad issue sales become a major component to our circulation.”

Hunsinger’s general point stands: digital product distribution is a great thing, but there are development and marketing costs with an iPad app so production isn’t a freebie. Besides, who among us expects him to come out, scratch his head and complain, “365? WTF?”

But compared to the hype of the iPad as a potential publishing bonanza, the implication of GQ’s sales numbers — be they 365 or 1,365 — are disappointing although I hedge with the caveat that it’s very early in the iPad’s lifecycle (productivity applications like Apple’s iWork suite. This leads me to wonder if trying to recreate the magazine experience on a digital device is a bit of a fool’s errand. If it’s content people want, a Web browser sits about anywhere these days for people to get it.

Besides, we’ve played this game before.

The holy grail for Web designers has been the pixel perfect layout afforded in print design. A number of years ago some publications jumped to Flash in order to replicate print layouts but that experiment went nowhere. Publishing services like Issuu and Zinio are still trying to make that model successful today by giving content developers the means to replicate their print design in a Flash interface.

The results? Novel and interesting, but clunky from a usability standpoint. Don’t believe me? Try Sporting News Today.

There’s no doubt that magazine iPad apps do make content visually beautiful, but publishers are essentially asking readers to pay for a design iteration. Are there really enough people with such nuanced design sensibilities to make that a business model?

Of course, design and photo heavy magazines have a leg up in this regard. While Steve Jobs might be offering a world originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org.

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

I started playing with Issuu to see what it can and could do. It’s basically a PDF Reader on steroids. If you click the “full screen” icon above, you’ll see what I mean.

I’m testing it out here with photos from a project I began last September called Subway.

The layout of the images was handled with Apple’s iPhoto. Basically, you can create “books” with your photos, so I did. Then I went to print it as a PDF, saved and uploaded, and what you have above is the result. Pretty cool.

By comparison, here’s what Flickr does with the same content. It’s a little bit of an apple and robots comparison though because Flickr is just showing us the images. They aren’t laid out like in the PDF.

Now, why actual publications are using Issuu is a bit confusing. It’s not intuitive, doesn’t lead to further content exploration and basically blows aside from the cool factor of having flippy pages.

Or put another way, I think it works well for graphics and images but if you visit Issuu and start exploring, you’ll see a number of magazines that are are print heavy using the platform. Unfortunately, these text heavy publications just don’t work on the platform. It becomes an interface pain in the yahoodle as you zoom in, out and over to read things.

My intuition is that designers are pushing organizations towards it because they can maintain their layouts. But as far as usability goes, this isn’t what we should be focusing on.

Instead, it’s a neat trick to play with our friends and family.

At issue is who’s benefiting from the practice. Is it secondary sources that publish the excerpts and perhaps have advertising surrounding it, or is it the primary source that might get extra readers from links back to the original article?

Generally, the excerpts have been considered legal, and for years they have been welcomed by major media companies, which were happy to receive links and pass-along traffic from the swarm of Web sites that regurgitate their news and information.

But some media executives are growing concerned that the increasingly popular curators of the Web that are taking large pieces of the original work — a practice sometimes called scraping — are shaving away potential readers and profiting from the content.

With the Web’s advertising engine stalling just as newspapers are under pressure, some publishers are second-guessing their liberal attitude toward free content.

While fair use hasn’t been settled in our age of digital reproduction, the article misses a significant factor in the entire debate: this is not a zero sum game. Both primary and secondary sources can benefit.

I’ll say at the outset that the practice of reposting articles in their entirety is negligent, wrong and any other negative you might want to apply. Whether it’s illegal is another question, or, put another way, do we want to waste our time and resources making it so? I’ll leave it to those with deeper pockets and legal departments to decide.

But the practice of fair use excerpting, of choosing that which you need to make a point by providing commentary around it and clearly linking back to the source material should not be threatening. It’s a social good that improves our understanding of the issues and ideas that affect our everyday lives.

As I wrote yesterday in a different context, the Danish government commissioned a report that explores the costs and benefits of file sharing on the music, film and gaming industries. In that context, the report’s authors write, “In the music industry, one track downloaded does not imply one less track sold.”

In the same vein, excerpting is file sharing of a type. Instead of using P2P technologies, we use cut and paste. The practical result is sharing, remixing, mashing and providing new and different context to an original.

What the Times misses though is the very simple idea that my reading a paragraph or two of one of its stories on another site does not equal one less reader sold. There are a few possibilities here:

• I read the the original story and I’m now looking for more context elsewhere;
• I never read the story but now that I’m hearing about it elsewhere I’ll go check the original out;
• I never read the original story but am now being exposed to the idea even though I’m not going to read the original;

It’s this third point that gets to the crux of the matter. The publishing industry is obviously in a bind with bankruptcies, layoffs and chaos hitting it on a daily basis. If it’s losing advertising dollars both in print and online, it’s an apparent concern if readers are not actually reading their original content. Or is it?

When I wrote the other day that publishers need new models, I touched on the fact that the central and primary asset they have is not the individual piece of content but the overall intellectual capital the content contributes to. Excerpting promotes that.

The more the blogosphere quotes, links, highlights and otherwise promotes the ideas generated by a primary source, the more valuable that primary source becomes.

It’s now up to the primary source to monetize that resource. Right now, they’re not and to strictly think in advertising terms around a discrete piece of content displays a fundamental lack of imagination in how that monetization can take place.

Instead, publishers as primary sources need to think of complementary and supplementary content and services that they can leverage. This can range from live Webcasts to in person events on the subject. In between are a host of other possibilities.

Important though is losing the fixation on a particular article here an there and instead understanding the forest for the trees.

Again though, it’s not selling the particular content but instead the organization that produces it. Solve that nut and I think we move our publishers back on stable ground.