"Business, Technology and the Media: Charting a Course Through Chaos"

Running notes from Bill Densmore from the two-day symposium, "Business, Technology and the Media: Charting a Course Through Chaos," at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, Missouri School of Journalism. There may be some typos in the moment, which we'll go back and correct later so consider this a work in progress! Also, there's a CoverItLive blog stream underway: WATCH LIVE VIDEO STREAM AND LIVE BLOG

This week's event is an initiative of the interdisciplinary Center for the Digital Globe (CDiG), the Alfred Friendly Foundation and the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI). It involves about 50 international industry leaders in media, technology and business. The idea is to create new business models and it's organized by Randy Smith, Donald W. Reynolds Chair of Business Journalism. Among participants: Mark VandenBrink, vice president of technology solutions for Samsung America; Beth Polish, senior vice president of Hearst Corporate Innovation; Ochieng Rapuro, managing editor of Kenya^Ys Business Daily newspaper; Jim Kennedy, vice president of strategy for The Associated Press; Vin Capone, development executive for Apple; Beth Keck, senior director for WalMart; Jin-Yong Park, assistant editor for Hankook-Ilbo (The Korea Times)and Phil Aucutt, managing partner for WR Holdings and president of Junit, LLC. (For a full list visit http://www.rjionline.org/cdig )

OPEN: Samsung exec overviews mobile growth: "A Live Look at 2040"

We're going for two full days on Monday, March 15 and Tuesday, March 16 (2010) here in Columbia, Mo. Getting us started this morning is Mark Vanden Brink, vp of technology solutions for the wireless terminals division of Samsung Telecommunciations America.

Social networking is becoming personal broadcasting, says Vanden Brink. He is sowing charts about the meteoric increase in video treams and viewing time on Facebook among its 400 million users. From August through October 2009, video usage on Facebook shot up 840% in the mobile market -- views via mobile. He calls this an "exaflood" of data on mobile. Mobile data traffic reached one exabyte/month at a rate twice as fast as fixed lines. "We're predicting that by 2013 we'll be in excess of 2 exabytes per month. We're talking the equivalent of 500 million DVDs being transmitted over the mobile data networks."

Trends shaping future mobile -- 50 megabits and micropayments from washing machines?

You now connect with colleagues via social network. he says more and more people now contact him preferentially through his social networks, rather than via mass communication. Some phones now have 12-megapixel cameras.

The other trend he identifies is "the loss of the medium." In five years, the notion of a cell phone is subsumed by the notion of the activity. "We are right now in the phase of mobile electronics and electronics in general, we talk about nouns and verbs ... what's actually happening is these things are slowly blurring together." Why do you have to have a phone for audio communciation? Vanden Brink, when you can do it over a multi-function device. Your social stream will augment your reality, he says.

Unbiquitous and high-speed connectivity is cited as another trend. He says it is no longer true that other countries are way ahead of the United States on high-speed wireless technology. He says there are 25 U.S. metros that now have so-called "4G" technology available. In his hotel in Columbia, Mo., now he was getting 3.5 megabits per second (Densmore note: That's fairly typical "high-speed" Internet in the United States now). He says 4G technology has a theoretical bandwidth for a download of about 50 megabits per second. He says the opening up of 4G networks for video transmission will free up bandwidth on the current 2G and 3G networks. It will make it possible to embed wireless chips in all kinds of devices -- vending machines, appliances -- "literally every device from dryers, refrigerators," says Samsung's Vanden Brink. "Is there a way to have a recurring revenue stream for a washer or dryer," he asks. "Those are the kind of thinks that are being bandied about by the industry."

Vanden Brink now talks about "pico projectors" which may be everywhere, able to display on walls or tables. He also mentions plastic paper, work making displays flexible. "The big thing to take away is what you look at today -- the idea of the device having a display, that will start to go away, the device will be able to display on other things and use other technologies," says Vanden Brink. He wraps up with a short video showing the use of plastic displays and augmented reality. "You really didn't see a computer in that anywhere, or a cellphone, you saw people interacting with any device that happened to be nearby . . . that type of technology is what we are talking about."

How does this affect journalism and news?

Vanden Brink says news is becomming more than text, even more than multimedia. It will be a dynamically aggregated and annotated "bundle" based on the individual that is:

Medium independent
Not time or channel specific, but relevance (context based)
A multi-way conversation rather than a monologue

"People are expecting to have this time shift, to have news on their own time .... it is becoming context and relevance specific."

Q&A starts: Where does privacy kick in?

RJI Fellow Michael Skoler asks where privacy fits in with all this. How do people want to interact?

Vanden Brink: He says there are times when we don't want to have all our life scenes publicized. "YOu may not want the story to follow you in the car, it may be something you want to control that is contextual and relevant to you." He acknowledges a fear of loss of privacy.

Jim Kenedy of The AP note: "What you don't think about is how much control can be built into the devices, into the cloud and actually you'll have more privacy, more control than you do now."

Clyde Bentley, another RJI fellow and professor at the Missouri School of Journalism notes TV series called "Caprica" (spelling?) which he says is very dark. "I wonder if the hardware companies will take a role in the new ethics and appropriateness of the technology."

"You know, I don't know the answer to that," says Vanden Brink. "People in the cloud, I know struggle with that, what are the ethics, what are they responsible for .... for (Samsung) our primary focus will be to enable enterprise-type controls, we'll supply the mechanism, I don't think that it is incumbent on any hardware manufacturer to do policy .... personally I think it is bgoing to be a family-type decision . . . the policy is probably going to have to come from someone else."

Keith Politte, a technologist at the Reynolds Journalism Institute, asks what the role of the journalism or industry to prototype new embedded chips for enabling acquisition of information and relationships?

Greg Moore of the Kansas City Star piggybacks off a question that Jonathan Friendly, who asked about adoption of news technology in underdeveloped countries. Moore asks about vision-impaired people, such as the elderly. Vanden Brink says the gap between early adopters and technology going mass market is getting shorter and shorter. He says access issues such as sight tend to be device-dependent.

Comparing Samsung's $5B R&D budget to the news industry's?

Larry Daily, journalism professor at the University of Nevada-Reno says Samsung has an impressive R&D budget. In 2007 it was more than $5 billion. He wonders how does that compare to the entire news industry's R&D budget "and what observations would you make about that?"

Vanden Brink says he doesn't have any information about that. There is no followup.

He talks about what's going on on the server side and the cloud. It's a question of how you structure metadata. There are some cameras they are looking at wondering what kind of geotagging should be included -- what devices are around you. There is a notion of documenting formats that is important. Device formats he thinks will take care of themselves.

How is Samsung tackling the problem of technological waste, when products become obsolete and are upgraded, asks Maria Garcia, a journalism doctoral student? How does Samsung tackle getting rid of the old projects? Vanden Brink says the Samsung website has a ton of information about this; they are launching a recyling effort; he also things technology may be able to upgrade and renew the live of some older devices.

PANEL: Predicting the Consumer of Tomorrow

Advertising agency executive and RJI fellow Stephanie Padgett is now leading a discussion among three futurists: Beth Polish (head of innovation for the Hearst Corp.), Beth Keck who heads sustainability programs for WalMart, Stephanie Durand (media-development consultant at the United Nations) and Lucas Welch, founder and chief innovation officer for Soliya.

News will be divorced from paper, Hearst exec says

"I feel a bit like a wuss, I am about to be asking you guys questions," says Polish, the Hearst futurist. She jokes that she was an anthropology expert in college and now she feels as if that major, which seemed to have nothing to do with media or business, is now mainstream. She think news will be fully divorced from paper in the future. "I know that is heretical considering where I work," she says.

She did focus groups this summer with college students. They weren't worried about whether what the heard on Twitter about the latest war was factual, that the community would police itself. "It changes the difference between who's the consumer and who is the producer, I think we are all going to be both in the future, we are all going to be able to produce all our content and be able to consume it, too." You can now capture the information you want and edit it.

"We talked about privacy, but we haven't talked about expectations. This ability to get information anywhere changes the expectations of the people we interact with. If you are at work, you can be reached at anytime . . . what is our expectation as to how quickly we get information . . . and how quickly we respond to it . . . I am really unnerved by the expectation of leading what is my personal life, what is my professional .... if I have a Twitter following, is that my company's is it mine?"

WalMart says 90% of consumers 'get' sustainability

Beth Keck talks about her role at WalMart. "We embraced sustainability five years ago." Big goals: Operate with zero waste and 100% renewable energy. WalMart customers are predominantly women and it is a diverse base across U.S., Mexico, China, India. Many of them are emerging into the middle class. In 40 years the planet will go from 6 billion to 9 billion people. That drives their sustainability business thinking, as do climate change and water. In Mexico City, some of WalMart's clients she works with don't have water 24 hours a day.

"We also see a rise in consumer responsibility," says Keck. She says one study finds 90 percent of Americans understand the importance of sustainability, but 25 percent don't think they can make a difference. Another big trend they see is that their customers have more connectivity -- she is looking for products from many channels. "We basically are focused on innovation in our business and innovation in our supply chain," she says. They are looking for a simple way to communicate the environmental and sustainability of the products they are buying. They are trying to do this through their supply chain communication and efficiency in that chain.

Beside consulting to the United Nations, Stephanie Durand is working on a new online resource, Global Expert Finder. She outlines media trends --- new markets, positive trends, more worrisome trends and constant trends. There is a trend for wanting more major news, and some of it has a more nationalist flavor. But she quotes Bill Kovach of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, who says news satisfies a basic human impulse, the awareness instinct. The consequence of the trends she sees: "A need for more accurate information."

What are the risks for the consumer of tomorrow: One risk is deciding between consuming minute-by-minute breaking news vs. access to opinion and accurate journalism. "This can lead to an oversimplification . . . does the consumer react . . . but become more passive as well?" She wonders if this leads to a more reactive news judgement -- making fast judgements. "Where is the distance and the judgement," she asks. "This risk is that news consumption becomes even more politically polarized."

Blogging can lead to an increasing skepticism, what is blogging, what is rumors? ere is a need to work at finding accuracy, truth, fairness, balance and a diversity of views. That's what she's working on with the Global Expert Finder project.

The challenge: Connecting siloed communities

Lucas Welch says the one thing that **isn't** changing in the new media ecosystem is the power of community. Welch began as a journalist working for ABC in the Middle East. But he left and started to build relationships between Western and Muslim societies. He calls it a Forest Gump moment for him. But he is seeing a shift away from the content being produced and "more toward the communities and the conversations we create." Need to think about consumers more as participants than consumers.

Welch asks: In production, curation/editing and distributioh, what role does community play in those functions? Curation is one of the most interesting ones, such as Digg, where recommendations bubble to the top. With distribution, "everyone in this room is our own publisher." In the future, "the distribution infrastructure is less about towers and broadcast and more about people." It's about fundamental principles of how communities organize. In the health-care debate, "we are not talking to each other ... we are in silos . . . we are in environments that produce vitriol .... how do we take these silos and connect them?"

Stephanie Padgett asks Welch, how are we going to form communities 20 years from now?

Welch says to look at how software is developed. Because developers know how to operate in chaos. "In the emerging principles of how software develops build software is they nurture relationship with their target audience and then they iterate often . . . put out a product and then iterate often, get as much feedback as you can ... to people building communities those principles apply . . and you need to be clear about how you are ... put a stake in the ground."

Padgett: How do we adapt as journalists?

Beth Polish replies: Journalists have to be facilitators. In the old ecosystem you put it out and it was final. The key now is not to lose the integrity.

Discussing communities and passion: WILL RECOVER LATER

AGGH! There is a fabulous discussion about passion and community just before the break that I was capturing and then lost when I went to save the wiki page. Please bookmark this -- I'll get it from the video and insert it within a couple of days because it was great! Particularly cited by Padgett as examples of this are Jeff Vander Clute's Avanoo social-media platform, and the LocalDirt.com food-market exchange.

Here's a little bit from RJI's CovertItLive blog:

10:35 RJI: Now taking questions!

Monday March 15, 2010 10:35 RJI 10:35 RJI: If you are on the web and want to ask a question, type it in and I'll ask for you.

Monday March 15, 2010 10:35 RJI 10:36 RJI: Question: If everything wants to be free how do journalists put food on the table?

Monday March 15, 2010 10:36 RJI 10:37 RJI: Lucas says opinion and local stories "bubble up well", but covering government other things requires extensive investment of resources. So this is the question, "what is the unique value proposition that can't be done by distributed communities."

Monday March 15, 2010 10:37 RJI 10:40 RJI:

Stephanie: The biggest challenge is that there has never been more access to information but there is skepticism, and people may be willing to pay for more credible information.

Monday March 15, 2010 10:40 RJI 10:41 RJI: Beth says she thinks that it may turn around, and find value in the people who are going out and doing the heavy lifting.

Monday March 15, 2010 10:41 RJI 10:43 RJI: The conversation is about how we are not saving time because we are connected all the time. Beth says her company is creating "norms to manage the connectivity" and are not sending e-mail over the weekend. Beth says her company is too, and now sends "do not open until Monday emails".

Monday March 15, 2010 10:43 RJI 10:46 RJI: Question: "With all this connectivity, I found myself disconnected.. and be more selective. Before I got to read in the newspaper information that I did not intend to find. Now I only go to places that are based on my preferences and wants...Twenty years from now ... I can see more and more passionate communities and people like me who do not want to be connected." How do we connect people who are in silos and people who are not connected?

Monday March 15, 2010 10:46 RJI 10:47 RJI: Stephanie: "The risk is that one does not leave his virtual community...the paradox is that we are so connected and so much in these polarized silo communities."

PANEL: Disruptive communications: A global view

We're now listening to a panel, "Disrupting Innovations Across Today's Globe," which features Mark VandenBrink of Samsung; Amanda Hickman of Document Cloud; Saleem Alhabash, a social-media graduate researcher; Ochieng Rapuro managing editor of the Kenyan Business Daily and Clyde Bentley of RJI. Moderator is Fritz Cropp.

Bentley: How technology disrupts

Bentley talks about the bell curve in telecommunications. In Europe telecom evolved on the bell curve because of an unchanging regulatory scheme. In the U.S., innovation was held up and then spiked after de-regulation. Says newspapers have only two years to adapt to the coming mobile evolution -- when most all news will be consumed on mobile devices. He cites Gartner research: By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide. He says AT&T claims to be rolling out LTE high-speed technology that will be so much faster than wired broadband modems that it will take over even in the home as the access method of choice to the web.

Bentley notes the QR code (a box of sqiggles in a print ad like a bar code. You can point a cell phone at it, read it and have that link you to online resources in real time. In Europe, there's an explosion of location-based services (services that uses your phone's connection with the mobile network to locate where you are and send you information related to products or services physically near you). He cites "MoJo: Office in Pocket." He wonders if newspapers will need offices any more if your entire toolset for reporting is in your pocket.

Jonathan Friendly asks about the efficacy of phones that know where you are -- how is that used? Samsung's VandenBrink responds: "I don't know that it is Samsung's responsibility to define the policy."

Yihui (Elina) Tang, a business doctoral student asks: Do you believe that the newsroom investment could bring you the clicks on advertising and money in the mobile environment?

Bentley: We haven't overcome the issues of screen real estate on the mobile device. That will get figured out.

Rapuro says newspapers still provide business credibility. They are portals that people trust.

Hickman: Some of what Document Cloud does will be hard to display on a cell-phone screen. But they are encouraging people asking questions about their sources.

AFTERNOON: How Will We Consume News and Information in the Next 10 Years?

The first after-lunch panel lead by Mike McKean as moderator. McKean is a professor at Mizzou and directs the Reynolds Journalism Institute Futures Lab. He overviews some of the futures-lab inititiatives and says the future of news is multimedia. Other panelists are Jim Kennedy, vp of strategy for The Associated Press, Tom Warhover, executive editor of The Columbia Missourian, Taylor Weigert, a Cincinnati-based marketing consultant and Vin Capone, a QuickTime and educational-software development executive at Apple Computer.

AP studies: Consumers turning to communities for news

Kennedy picks up on some of his discussion from last night, describing both the atomization of news, as well as ethnographic studies which suggest consumers want more context and background in news and that they are turning to communities for news. He said The AP starting trying to think about what people want to do with their day, rather than "what news to deliver." They have renamed the four attributes fo news. Major forces that bind communities are around:

Personal collaboration with the advertisers or provider
Establishing a new social contract that respects the audience -- no bombarding with ads
Kinship -- understanding what the audience wnats
Compassion -- being open and honest
Offering reciprocity -- trading information
Relevance -- The ad or headline has to be relevant to their lives

"We are really trying to understand our audience as we go from here," says Kennedy. The AP has been working on Facebook, as well as Twitter. "What we are using those accounts for is to connect with the audience to ask them what they want," says Kennedy. "We are getting feedback from the audience, we are not blasting out the news." AP reporters "are getting turned on by this," and some old timers are enjoying connecting on an individual level with user. They haven't developed products or business models yet, "but it is that first step which is to build the connection with the audience."

Reinventing a small daily paper -- Junit and The Missourian

Warhover, who directs the editorial operations of The Missourian, the five-day-a-week paper run by the Missouri School of Journalism, says he wants to center on the question of how you create context and meaning. "What we need to create for our journalism is more meaning per inch," says Warhover. When you do a good search, do you look at all 100,000 hits, asks Warhover? He says what's important is the paragraph in an 800-page document "that gives me the context for what I need to understand." The job ofthe journalist, says Warhover, that will still be needed "is that job of sensemaker. How do we make sense of our world and how do we collaborate with the people we serve -- because journalism is a public service."

For years, he has been thinking not about how journalists deal with conflicts of interests, but "how do we get the connections right." He says Matt Thompson, a former RJI fellow, talked at South by Southwest about merging episodic information with contextual information -- how do you build an encyclopedia-like resource that lets you understand what's going on in Iraq? At The Missourian, students have developed a Wikipedia-like encyclopedia resource. It will launch when it has 500 or more items. There is a verification process that is being applied, so it is beyond Wikipedia in that sense.

Taylor Weigart describes the coming era of the information agent which will find custom news for consumers.

"I don't read the newspaper, I don't buy books in print format because I think it is pretty bad for the environment," says Capone. "Teach me, tell me a story or make me laugh -- I'll pay for that." He was once in charge of the digital edition of the Los Angeles Times, and he told the story of putting the whole newspaper front page into a PDF the couldn't be read on a computer screen.

Q&A

Weigart is it possible to have it my way? Having it custom for yourself makes it possible to be a source for other people, too. The fact that it is custom to you enables the community to participate more.

McKean: You don't buy the argument that having it our way is destructive of communities?

Kennedy: He says he buys that the all-knowing editor isn't going to make all the decisions anymore. They days of an editor editing for his own intersts are really over. The users want to be a part of the process now.

Warhover: There really is no may way to the exclusion of all else. You might want your way on your iPhone, but you want other stuff coming in too.

Capone: Someone else will find some value in your way. "I don't think it is a have or have-not choiced."

Jonathan Friendly: The best editors were omniquizzical.

Jim Kennedy: He edited The AP business wire to suit himself, because he thought he knew what the newspaper business editors he was serving wanted to print in their papers. Kennedy sees those days as being over. "Why don't you open up the newspaper office to the community over weekends and teach them how to blog?" he asks. He says the lack of input and connection with the users is still endemic in the news industry. The AP General Desk is now called the "nerve center," and is headed by a 26-year-old.

Coleman Hutchins of Fleishman Hillard asks about evergreen content and longform stories.

Kennedy thinks the next phase of the Internet -- "lean back" long form content -- is ripe for that. It presents the possibility to develop content that will be played and read over again for a long time.

Warhover: Thinks newspapers have a lot of things with shelf life and that is where the industry can and does have a competitive advantage. "We need to go short short, or long long. What kills us is the episodic story."

McKean: Thinks there will have to be ways to automate things so that the material produced that has shelf life will be easier to create.

Ed Lambeth, emeritus professor at Mizzou asks a question: Is it possible that things going on in universities real significant to communities are mined.

Jim Kennedy talks a bit about The AP's efforts to protect its intellectual property. Nothing new in what he's saying here -- the AP wants to understand how its content is being used and stop flagrant infringers, not stop benign, isolated, non-commercial use.

Weigart talks about http://www.pandora.com Pandora Radio] being an unmatch music experience.

Mills: As publisher of a smalltime newspaper, he is fascinated and terrified; how does it leave publishers and members.

Always have been a BtoB business provider. "and I think in the future we are going to be more of a BtoB and BtoC. They will create applications that can e used direct to consumers. "I think we'll go direct to market together and benefit from the intelligence we all get."

"I'm terrified for you so don't worry."

Rji-chaos

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