Tablets have been around for a while, it's time we finally learn how people use them.

Well, SND STL was amazing and is finally in the books. After a little recovery and catch-up-on-reading time, I’ve found my next side project: The Poynter Institute’s new eye-tracking study, focused on tablet design and user experiences.

I remember when the previous eyetracking studies were released it was kind of like this kid on Christmas morning. I’ve regularly referred to them and re-read them throughout my career and now to be involved in the project now is amazingly humbling and exciting. The group involved in this round of research is like my fantasy journalism design team: Sara Quinn, Dr. Mario Garcia, Jeremy Gilbert, David Stanton, Rick Edmonds, Regina McCombs, Roger Black, Rusty Coats, Andrew DeVigal, Jeff Sonderman, Jennifer George-Palilonis, Michael Holmes, Damon Kiesow, Miranda Mulligan, Tor Bøe-Lillegraven, Nora Paul, Robin Sloan, and Matt Thompson.

Our focus this time around, tablets, are an interesting beast because they seem to marry dynamic and interactive content of the web with the portability and “lean back” nature of print or even TV experiences. Often lumped in with mobile devices, tablets are similar, but very unique in many ways. Mobile is always with you and very utility, speed-driven; tablets tend to be portable within the house and workplace, and early research shows that people tend to consume more content and for longer periods on them than either mobile or the web.

We’re going to look at design challenges such as which view do people people prefer to consume content in most frequently – portrait or landscape.  Even in those two options, I suspect the behaviors from users on an 10-inch, letter-box shaped device like the iPad may differ greatly from those on a 7″ tablet, like the Kindle Fire. Or the type of content they’re consuming will likely also change the results, from my personal anecdotal experience (and what I’ve observed in others), I tend to read text more frequently in portrait mode and video in landscape no matter what device. But that’s just anecdotal.

There’s lots to learn and this research will offer ‘more than a hunch’ solutions to help us all improve our products. Specifically, we’ll focus on some of these issues and questions, which Sara spelled out in her original announcement post:

• Tools and tasks: How intuitive can tablet navigation be and how long does it take to successfully complete a task?
• Satisfaction: How happy are users with an overall experience and how does that impact their perception of the credibility of the source?
• Comprehension and retention: Which forms help people to understand and remember what they have seen or read?
• Business and revenue: What strategies might work for news organizations? For advertisers? For consumers? How might editors set up a newsroom to create content for a tablet product?

How you can help right now

• Your questions - Share your thoughts, comments and suggestions on the Poynter Eye-Tracking research page on Facebook and follow along there to learn more about what we’re learning.
• Funding – The Knight Foundation and CCI Europe is helping kick in money, but the more funding, the more extensive research we can do. Please contact Sara about this at: squinn [at] poynter.org.

Greetings Carnies!
For this installment of the Carnival of Journalism we’re going to go ultra practical:

What are your life hacks, workflows, tips, tools, apps, websites, skills and techniques that allow you to work smarter and more effectively?

As a recovering RSS-aholic, (my Google Reader account peaked around 2,100 about a year and half ago, I’ve paired it down to 931 currently and am looking to drop that by a half this summer) I’ve always marveled at people like Robert Scoble who seems to be everywhere and tracking everything. Part of this is because he’s an information hound, part social media addict and it’s also part his job to be out there in the conversation with the tech industry. Tim Ferris interviewed him four years ago about his 600+ feeds and how he digs through them for good information.

In my effort to cull my RSS feeds, I’ve relied much more on social networks for network curation but in that transition I realized I was doing it wrong, again. This Winter while meeting with a group of news nerds talking about their workflows, most confessed that they read only a very small portion of their Twitter alerts. At this time, I was close to reading around 70-80+% (obviously that fluctuated but on the average day I’d hit that number or higher); almost everyone else in the room was in the 5-15% range.

So during 2011, I’ve tried to focus on finding more tools and techniques to help boost productivity and save time, while not compromising the quality of information/work completed. Everyone has different ideas on what makes their workflow work, and while sites like Lifehacker.com does a fantastic job, I believe journalists especially manage and filter a lot of information every day, so it would be fascinating to share some of our best practices with the JCarn community.

So for instance, what tools, plugins, apps and websites do you use to get the most out of the day?
For example, here are a few that I’ve tried at various times:

• Use a personalized aggregates like TweetedTimes, Summify or Flip Board on the iPad
• Use Tweetdeck to track social network updates, then clear the ones you’ve already read using the “Clear All” button in the column so you only read stuff you haven’t seen
• Build a series of custom Google alerts to track topics and filter it using Yahoo Pipes
• Tracking , filtering and sharing your archive and bookmarks through Delicious, Diigo, or Pinboard (Journerdism’s Jambalaya Links have been half published by using Delicious for years)

What work techniques and strategies have you learned over the years that help boost your productivity and effectiveness?
More examples of things I’ve tried to get you thinking:

• Only use the “http://five.sentenc.es/” technique for (most) email responses (Or four or three or two sentences)
• If it’s not time-critical, try to focus on emailing people around 8-9 a.m. in the morning so it’s at the top of their mailbox as soon as they get in, responses tend to be higher because they haven’t developed email fatigue yet
• Use the phone / IM for all quick messages, only check mail twice a day as Tim Ferris recommends in the Four-Hour Workweek
• Use the 37 Signals “Getting Real” technique for managing and organizing effective meetings

Other ideas?

• What do you read each day to get the most bang for your buck? I love the series the Altantic does about this with various gadflies and influentials on their content consumption habits.
• How do you stay up to date on your beat and interest areas? Marshall Kirkpatrick posted an amazing behind the scenes guide to how he tracks tech for Read Write Web
• How do you find stories, track and filter information on your beat/interest areas? I really dug the ingenuity of this reporter using their site search analytics to find uncovered story ideas.
• How and what do you track to see what’s working and what’s not in your workflow? Personal analytics is a fascinating area to track, test, iterate and improve your performance.
• What do you find it’s better to just pay for rather than spend the time doing? iAnnotate is an iPad app that I love for quickly signing off on PDF’s and documents for papers and contracts that require signatures (rather than trying to find a printer, printing it off, signing it, then scanning or faxing the pages)
• … What else?

Our deadline for publishing will be Friday, June 10th. I hope we can all help each other become better, more productive and informed journalists.

The journalism carnival this week is about how Knight or RJI could help fuel innovation. My thought: Solve the epic problem of curmudgeons poisoning the well at journalism schools.

In my travels over the past few years speaking to journalism students and educators across the country, I’ve been too often shocked and disappointed by the number of professors teaching journalism who don’t understand — and even defiantly abhor digital technologies. I’ve also heard many horror stories from friends who have left their news organizations to teach full time, whom have echoed my observations and been disheartened trying to fight the good fight and educate the next generation of journalists. The thought of Luddite professors infecting their students with this view makes me feel ill and lose faith in the future of journalism. I believe the journalism education industry needs to massively take a look at itself and re-educate the educators, and without the help of an organization like Knight or RJI they’ll probably never do it, or do it fast enough.

Don’t get me wrong, I know there’s many, many, many awesome professors out there who live and die by digital and are constantly re-educating themselves to keep up. …But for every Jen Reeves, Rich Gordon, or Matt Waite there’s at least half a dozen professors who worked in a very different journalism business many decades ago.

Let me be clear, I’m by no means being age-ist here, I’m being stuck-in-the-mudist. There are many, many professors with distinguished careers who have embraced digital and are helping educate the next army of journalists, coast to coast from Vin Crosbie at Syracuse to Paul Grabowicz at UC-Berkeley.

I don’t have any sort of perfect solution (wow, a blogger who doesn’t think they’re smarter than everyone! j/k …sorta) but I believe universities really need to look at new ways to get their faculty (and administrators leading the faculty and curriculum development) re-educated, refreshed and working with interdisciplinary departments for the modern media environment. Specifically, I think Knight and RJI could help facilitate this by focusing their considerable resources and connections to leaders in many different disciplines that could help with retraining the resistant professors who attack, criticize and resist digital journalism.

It’s a very tall task. And at times I think it’s too tall, and it should just be left to fail. But journalism is too important and organizations like Knight and RJI have the power to help this transition.

A couple ideas:

• Offer 3-6 month paid residencies for faculty (outside of their tenure sabbaticals) at an organization — non-traditional journalism organizations, especially — or digital training facility, like Poynter, the J-Lab or KDMC. Knight or RJI could ‘buy out’ the professors schedule from the school for the quarter or semester and basically send them back to the workforce or training to get them up to speed. The school gets a more skilled professor, the professor learns and networks with a new crowd, the students get a better learning experience from the professor and Knight/RJI is able to make a difference.
• Marshall resources to bring a network of experts into schools to discuss technology, entrepreneurship, data, marketing, business, design, and the other fields that journalism overlaps with but doesn’t dive as deep as it could.
• Build a network for sharing lesson plans and syllabi, or partner with some of the organizations already doing this on a limited level.
• Help provide support and resources for faculty meetings to start being injected with discussion of new technologies, tutorials and discussion about technology. Require each staff member to bring items to discuss to the meeting.
• Simple things like encouraging ‘grassroot change’ efforts in the journalism departments. Such as putting up a bulletin board of technology news related to journalism next to the elevators has worked very well slowly eroding even the most curmudgeonly journalists from my experience at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. (Actually, several of the items on that old blog post apply here too):
  • Show them the competition, what other schools are doing. People are inherently competitive, journalists even more so.
  • Flier their mailboxes (virtual or digital) with relevant articles, news and info — especially related to their beat that they can learn from

[This post originally appeared on RJIonline.org]

RJI and it’s Digital Publishing Alliance, headed by Roger Fidler, has released it’s iPad research survey from 1,609 respondents. There’s a lot of interesting info, especially about the demographic profiles of users and their consumption experiences, but this tidbit stuck with me as the most interesting for newspapers:

Among the 931 respondents who indicated that they currently subscribe to print newspapers, there is a statistically significant, moderately strong, positive correlation between iPad news consumption and the likelihood of canceling their print subscriptions. For example, more than half (58.1%) of the respondents who subscribe to printed newspapers and use their iPad at least an hour a day for news said they are very likely to cancel their print subscriptions within the next six months.

This seems to mirror what a News Corp exec said less than a month ago and is likely why Rupert Murdoch abandoned his digital $30 million “Project Alesia” digital news stand for existing print products and is instead focusing instead on creating a new, iPad-only publication called “The Daily.”

Other interesting tidbits from the survey:

Subscription prices are expected to be lower than print.

When asked in an open-ended question what factors would influence the users’ decisions to purchase news apps or newspaper subscriptions on their iPad, “a price lower than the price of a print subscription” was mentioned most often.

Positive user experiences are critical.

Users also indicated that they want a very easy-to-use and reliable app, with access to at least all the content available in the printed edition.

Video and interactivity weren’t top-of-mind preferred content formats.

While respondents mention video and interactive features, they are much less commonly expressed in the survey than the aforementioned issues.

Read more information about the survey results here.

I’ll also be tweeting and possibly blogging some from the RJI – DPA Tablet & E-Reader Symposium over the next two days.

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Will Sullivan is a 2010-2011 Reynolds Journalism Fellow studying mobile development. He blogs on the RJI Mobile Blog and Journerdism.com. He can be reached at will @ Journerdism.com, on Twitter @Journerdism or on Facebook.

This post originally appeared on the Reynolds Journalism Institute, where Will Sullivan is a 2010-2011 Reynolds Journalism Fellow studying mobile development.

Following the Online News Association, one message was clear to me, news organizations are finally beginning the “Age of APIs.” (Or Application Programming Interfaces for the non-techies out there. Here is a gentleman with a beard explaining APIs.)

My brief ‘how to explain it to my mom’ summary is: API’s are like RSS feeds on steroids.

APIs allow more control, customization and tracking that a simple RSS feed allows to syndicate your content outside of your website. This extra control allows content creators to easily create multi-platform products (such as mobile, tablet and TV) by displaying content in whatever form factor necessary because the content display is independent of the content form. APIs also allow for richer media and data to have more freedom than a standard RSS feeds allows.

APIs also help content creators grow their audience by allowing outside developers the ability to take your content and mix and mash it up to create completely new content experiences. For instance, Stamen Design used Twitter’s API to create and amazing visualization of Tweets around the Video Music Awards.

Using APIs can also allow more control over the syndication of your content (which could be a business opportunity for sharing your full content only to approved providers) because in order to use the API, you must be given an API Key from the source. The practice of charging for APIs though, generally goes against what most API developers are looking to create by sharing their information and technical skills mashing content up into new products. For news organizations there might be opportunities to monetize APIs by directly charging for access, offering revenue shares or other business models.

Two of the top honors at the ONA Online Journalism Awards were given for NPR’s use of APIs and their mobile apps (which was made possible by their robust API):

Gannett Foundation Award for Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism
NPR API

Outstanding Use of Emerging Platforms
NPR.org Mobile Applications

There was also a great session at ONA about “Content Sharing Through API’s” in which API developers and leaders from USA Today, NPR (although he’s now at Netflix developing their API), Mashery and Public Radio Exchange.

APIs are not a new idea, I wrote about the need for news orgs to build API’s from South by Southwest two years ago, but news organizations that have jumped on the API train are starting to see great benefits of building their content quickly to multiple platforms using in this technology.

The Guardian has been a pioneer in this arena, offering several different APIs from story content to data.

The New York Times was an early innovator too and they now offer more than a dozen different APIs for content ranging from movie reviews to congressional news.

NPR has been on the train for some time, and most notably saw a 100% increase in traffic over a 12-month period, attributed to their API being used for mobile platforms. The API also allowed them to develop their mobile apps much quicker — in a few weeks — not months.

USA Today recently released their API too.

The government offers dozens of APIs.

Facebook’s on board.

Everyblock does it.

Google has tons.

Microsoft too.

Twitter? Totally.

Etc.

Etc.

Etc.

Etc.

Even crowdfunding journalism start-up Spot.Us has drank the Kool-Aid. (Full Disclosure: I live with Spot.Us golden boy David Cohn and he’s awesome.)

Hopefully more news organizations will join the API bandwagon now having seen the benefits of these leading media companies have experienced by freeing their content will lead to more adapting quickly.

Just having an API isn’t enough though. During the ONA session on APIs, the panelists said to be successful — especially attracting developers to build with your content — good APIs should have:

• Excellent documentation (to explain how to use the API)
• Developer support (to help developers trying to use the API)
• Generous terms of use (to help get more people interested in using the API)

The session on “Content Sharing Through API’s” is available for viewing here (jump to about 7:30 in the video to avoid some bad audio and video testing before the actual session).

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Will Sullivan is a 2010-2011 Reynolds Journalism Fellow studying mobile development. He can be reached at will @ Journerdism.com, on Twitter @Journerdism or on Facebook.