TimesOpen Keynote: Technology and the Future of the Newspaper

Technology and the future of the newspaper

Tim O’Reilly

O’Reilly Media, Inc.www.oreilly.com

NY Times TimesOpenFebruary 20, 2009

Thursday, February 19, 2009

How many of you have O’Reilly books?

What We Really Do At O'Reilly

Change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators

Some Examples

• First books on Linux and Perl - 1991• First book on the internet, covered WWW when there were only 200 web sites - 1992

• Launched first commercial web site, 1993• First advocacy about web services - 1997• Organized meeting where term “open source” was adopted - 1998

• Coined term Web 2.0 to describe rules for new internet platform - 2004

• Make: celebrates the new DIY - 2006• Now working on “Government 2.0”

How we do it

•Find interesting technologies and people innovating from the edge

•Amplify their effectiveness by spreading the information needed for others to follow them.

•Books

How we do it

•Books, Conferences

How we do it

•Books, Conferences, Online

"The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet."

--William Gibson

NYT Research Labs

Five Futures That Are Changing Newspapers

Tim O’Reilly

O’Reilly Media, Inc.www.oreilly.com

NY Times TimesOpenFebruary 20, 2009

1. “Harnessing Collective Intelligence”

as is wikipedia

Digg is an obvious example of crowdsourcing

But Google teaches us something deeper

Consider pagerank

Web 2.0 is about finding meaning in user-generated data,

and turning that meaning into real-time user-facing services

Wesabe does this with its tips

comparing two merchants based on credit card data

Real-time is critical.

Google, Walmart & mybarackobama.com - Obama’s

Is there a newspaper equivalent to Project Houdini?

Don’t show it to me again.

The network as platform means that competitive advantage goes to systems that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.

Questions for newspapers

• What assets do you have that increase in value through participation?

– Knowledge about your readers?– Knowledge from your readers?– Your brand as it is spread by others?– Your accumulated history?

• What assets do you have that benefit from the real time nature of online information?

• How do you involve your readers in increasing the value of what you do?

2. Social Networking

social network graph of congressional twitterers

my facebook news feed

my twitter input feed

my twitter output feed

retweetradar

nivi and the @timoreilly bump

NyTimes twitter feed for contrast

This is important!

• In social networks, you gain and bestow status through those you associate with

• A key function of a publishing brand is the bestowal of status by what you pay attention to

• If you only pay attention to yourself, you aren’t as valuable to your community

– You don’t learn as much from your readers– You don’t bind them to you by amplifying their

NY Times letters to the editor

Times People - it’s a ghost town for me

Now imagine if my twitter or facebook friends were there

• A key question for all of us is when to lead, and when to follow

NY Times most popular articles

But take a closer look at how Digg involves its readers and gives them

Opportunities?

• All those people who emailed stories probably commented in their email. Invite them to share?

• Does this make them more valuable to advertisers?

• Most blogged? Where are the links? • Most mailed ≠ most blogged• If I’ve already read it, I might want to “digg” it, twitter it, tag it in del.icio.us? Too geeky for most readers? Add configuration to my subscription

NY Times comments - a lot of comments - too many to read and

Markmail, a tool for mailing lists, could be useful?

markmail identifies the most frequent posters on a topic

NY Times comment API

3. Programming as Journalism

USAspending.gov

Stimuluswatch.org

Instedd

Global Virus Forecasting Initiative

Adrian Holovaty at LJWorld.com - creating a context for people to share

chicagocrime.org & database driven local news

everyblock.com

outside.in

The shakeshack and how users are instrumenting it with twitter

Hyper-local is just the beginning

Instrumenting the World

We are moving out of the world in which people typing on keyboards will drive collective intelligence applications. Increasingly, applications are driven by new kinds of sensors.

how good collective sensor data is getting - flickr geotagged photos

The smart phone plus local search. Today pizza, tomorrow news?

4. The Internet As Platform

Two Types of Platform• One Ring to Rule Them All

• Small Pieces Loosely Joined

Let’s start with the web itself

A NY Times web page that only links to itself

A well formed blog that is part of the “small pieces loosely joined” world

We screwed up too - Safari books online

In porting over old media, we forgot the links

new tools like apture let you keep people on your site while also giving

More apture

Now let’s move on to web services

Now let’s take this to APIs. Google Maps king of the hill, per

housingmaps.com - the very first Google maps mashup• It was a “hack.” Google learned from it, quickly, and turned it into a supported feature

Apple brings geotagging to iPhoto via Gmaps

But look - people can also PUT data on google. Museum layer on Google

Google maps as a model

• Mashups were invented by users - the API came later to support them

• It’s open• It’s two-way: innovations outside Google can be brought onto Google

If you’re really building a platform, your customers and partners build new features before you do

Twitter hashtags and news - both hashtags and the real time search

Stocktwits

tweetdeck

peoplebrowsr

Why I like the twhirl client

Ginx has some interesting new features

bit.ly as a twitter client

• How about offering this kind of thing from the NYT?

bit.ly and the power of instant tracking

bit.ly-twitter integration

my facebook news feed

Lessons from Twitter

• Do one thing and do it well• Let others build on what you do, even if it appears to compete with you

• When users innovate, support their behaviors in your platform (@, #, $)

• “Insert and extend” :-)

5. Asymmetric Competition

Top sites on the internet, 2005

Rank Company # Employees

1 Yahoo 9,000 2 TimeWarner 85,0003 Microsoft 61,0004 Google 5,0005 eBay 11,0006 News Corp 38,000

7 Craigslist 188 Disney 129,0009 BBC 60,000

10 IAC 26,000

NY Times vs Washpost & huffpost on compete

nytimes.com vs digg on compete

Voiceofsandiego.org

• Some people say that the answer is for investigative journalism to become a non-profit activity

micropayments

You pick the hat to fit the head

What Job Does a Newspaper Do?

•http://cache.gettyimages.com/xc/3376845.jpg?v=1&c=ViewImages&k=2&d=89B856506CE5465432B9C151F29BA0CBA55A1E4F32AD3138

What Job Does a Newspaper Do?

• “All the News That’s Fit to Print”• Serious Investigative Reporting• Connection to local community• Driving attention to what’s important• Curation and bestowal of status• Entertainment• ...

• There may be different answers for each of these jobs

Taking a Road Trip

• http://autos.canada.com/greatcanadianroadtrip/index.html

Taking a Road Trip

• http://autos.canada.com/greatcanadianroadtrip/index.html

It’s not a tour of gas stations!

This might be where you end up

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/06/12/opinion/0613-GASPUMPS_index.html

People need what newspapers do

• You are members of a great profession• Billions of people are coming online, waiting to be taught, informed, entertained

• “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”*

*Alan Kay

For More Information

• What is Web 2.0? http://www.oreillynet.com/go/web2 • http://tim.oreilly.com• http://radar.oreilly.com

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