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.

This Oct. 27, 2011 blog post is mirrored from an internal site at Lee Enterprises, my current employer. I thought it might be handy to those outside the company too, so I’m cross-posting it here.

It’s easy to get caught up in all the razzle-dazzle of mobile and tablet apps when we think about new products, audiences and revenue opportunities but, we shouldn’t neglect or ignore the potential that e-books can offer also. Apps are great for providing utility and new technical products and functionality and e-books can compliment that by leveraging our core strength or what Jim Collins calls the “Hedgehog concept” in his book “Good to Great” by creating accurate, detailed, engaging local narrative content. E-books offer us the opportunity to repackage and resell a lot of our deep and valuable information in a digital format for rabid readers.

The Kindle platform, which works on just about every mobile, tablet or computer device, is especially intriguing, including their special category of “Kindle Singles” which Wired writer Charlie Sorrel described as, “one-off pieces of non-fiction and journalism which are typically much shorter than a novel, but longer than a magazine article.” The content can vary largely from single long-form narrative articles to combining a series of columns from a popular columnists into one digital document, or even a full-fledged narrative book built around a local topic, person/team or issue in the area (from the local mysterious murder case to the local team’s Cinderella climb to the championship).

Here are a handful of reasons why we should take a closer look at e-books and Kindle Singles for spreading our content:

• E-books enable and create rabid reading habits, like crack addicts. The Wall Street Journal sites a study that says 40 percent of e-reader owners said they read more now than they did with print books. Anecdotally, I know this is true with myself and people I know who use e-readers, but even beyond e-reader users, the ability to always pick up any book I’m currently reading at at my current place on my phone, computer or tablet in any idle-time moment really helps feed a bibliophile’s addiction.
• E-books are continuing to grow (up 153 percent in the past year). This will only grow exponentially as Amazon is launching the Kindle Fire tablet, the first what some are calling a serious competitor to the iPad. Their OS software is modified to showcase and feature your media content including books and movies. Amazon is actually selling the Kindle Fire at about a $10 loss per unit, hedging that the users will buy so many digital goods through them that they’ll make up the difference. Read Write Web declared eBooks as one of the top trends of 2010, pointing out: “At the end of October Amazon announced that for its top 10 best-selling books, customers bought the Kindle edition twice as often as the print copy. According to Amazon’s VP for Kindle, Steve Kessel, Kindle eBook sales also topped print sales of hardcovers and paperbacks for its top 25, top 100 and top 1,000 bestsellers.” Even the traditional university book presses are starting to publish ‘singles’ to take advantage of this new market and technology.
• Potential audiences are huge; rather than just creating content for desktop users, or iPad or iPhone users, Kindle singles and e-books are available on almost all platforms so the potential audience is much larger.
• Revenue can be substantially larger. Robert Niles illustrates this perfectly on the Online Journalism Review:

Here’s why you should consider amplifying your investment in eBook development. Here are the prices of the top 20 paid apps in the iOS app store, as of last night:

$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$2.99
$0.99
$0.99
$1.99
$1.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99

Now, here are the prices of the top 20 paid eBooks in Apple’s iBooks store, for comparison:

$9.99
$14.99
$12.99
$2.99
$12.99
$12.99
$0.99
$9.99
$12.99
$1.99
$12.99
$11.99
$14.99
$14.99
$12.99
$3.99
$14.99
$9.99
$12.99
$14.99

In which market would you rather try to make money?

Let’s sharpen the focus a bit. In the News category in the app store, most expensive paid app in the top 20 is Instapaper at $4.99. There is no News category in the iBooks store, but let’s use Politics & Current Events as the closest approximation. Of the top 20 paid eBooks in that category, 19 of the top 20 sell for $4.99 or more.

Clearly, the public is willing to – and does – pay more for content in eBooks than it does in apps. That fact should encourage any serious news business to take a serious look at eBooks.

• E-reader owners also tend to be regular newspaper readers according to Scarborough Research, so they’re familiar with and trust our content and brands. So they will be easier to market new e-book products to through our existing properties.
• E-books can help reach and target different audiences, a recent consumer research survey of 26,000 respondents found that women are 52 percent more likely than men to own an e-reader, and men are 24 percent more likely than women to own a tablet.
• Save on publishing costs compared to traditional book publishing. Rather than having to go though book publishers for all the raw materials, e-books don’t cost any glue, paper or ink and depending on your product price, with Kindle eBooks up to 70% of the cost can go straight to the author/publisher.  (Apple’s iBook store is another option, but it is much more restrictive, requiring an ISBN number for the book, which can cost more than a hundred dollars to register.)
• Incredibly simple publishing process. Any block of text has the potential to become an e-book. The Kindle store can take formats from PDF, to Word Document, to ePub, to HTML and more. So any series of articles, or even a big Sunday feature story could be turned into a Kindle Single.
• Added functionality and sharing are growing user benefits, from book sharing to note-taking and sharing to Amazon’s new HTML5-based format that allows for much more design and interactivity in e-books.

Here’s a handful of media organizations that have started to experiment with E-Books and Kindle Singles for various content types:

• The Guardian has started offering Kindle e-book “Shorts” from some of their series/issue coverage, including breaking the News Corp phone hacking scandal for £2.29
• The Chicago Tribune published the “Chicago Bears 2011″ which is literally a series of their training camp articles organized into topics for The Monsters of the Midway.
• Ars Technica sold a 19-page, $5 Kindle e-book of their OS X 10.7 Lion review, and eclipsed 3,000 copies in the first 24 hours of the sale (Thanks to Chris Keller for the tip!)
• The Boston Globe produced a series of books about historical crime and gangsters from their region, the most recent about Whitey Bulger.
• The Washington Post created a $2.99 e-book about The Hunt for Bin Laden after his capture

UPDATE, 7/10/11: The Society for News Design is also on the prowl for some new leadership! Nominations for their Secretary/Treasurer position is now open (they use a ladder system for the executive leadership, so in three years you could be the president). As you may know, I’m also heavily involved in SND and working as co-director of the SND St. Louis convention. The deadline for nominations is Sunday, July 31st and the winner of the election will actually be announced in St. Louis at the shindig, so bust a move. Check out all the details here.

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Reminder: Monday, July 18th is the deadline for the Online News Association’s call for Board of Director nominations.

ONA is becoming one of the largest and most influential journalism organizations in the world, so the role the Board of Directors plays is not only steering the organization, but the potential future of journalism. So we really need the best and brightest allies at the helm. Please come join us or consider if any leaders you know might be interested and spread the word!

It may seem like an insurmountable goal to get elected, and believe me, I know. When I ran for election last year I didn’t think I really had a chance going up against more than 20 amazing leaders from around the country, including seven excellent incumbents, but thanks to your support, I was elected and have been rocking out and making a difference with the MJ Bear Fellowships, student and educators committee (and with that helping found ONA Mizzou) and ONA Issues. Also at board meetings, I’ve done my best to help drive the strategy, represent ‘fly-over country’ and made strong (sometimes unpopular) stances on issues I believed in, including challenging the removal of term limits for board members. (Fyi, Liz Lufkin and I were the only votes against. See page 5 of the Jan. meeting minutes if you want more info.) The board has a lot of power and a heavy hand in the organization, and with removal of term limits it’s exponentially important that we reach out to find the best, active leaders to help steer the organization.

Don’t get me wrong, ONA is doing fantastic, but as Uncle Ben in Spiderman said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” We need to keep up the great progress and continue to move forward and lead past the digital transition into the future. If you’re at all considering running, please contact me [Will -at- Journerdism.com] and feel free to ask any questions.

I’d also especially encourage those potential candidates who are based in the Midwest, South, West and international, and who believe in / work in entrepreneurial projects, community news or emerging technologies. We’re seeking out candidates who can help us represent more diversity in medium and geographic location on the board to help reflect members’ interests and growth areas in the industry.

Help us help the industry. Get involved.

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 month the Carnival of Journalism asks:

Considering your unique circumstances what steps can be taken to increase the number of news sources?

We’re currently at a turning point in communication, where just as the proliferation of cheap/free and easy blogging software saw a digital publishing revolution explode, the proliferation of mobile reporting and publishing platforms will as Clay Shirky once said “… let a thousand flowers bloom…” in offering more diverse and direct sources of news.

We’ve most recently seen how during the Egyptian revolution that mobile reporting tools in the hands of a community helped get the news out, even in the face of amazing adversity when the government shut down the Internet and tried to choke mobile coverage.

As part of my fellowship at Reynolds, I’ve helped collect and share a massive resource for mobile reporting tools and best practices.

To paraphrase Aaron Sorkin’s fictitious dialogue in The Social Network:

“A million news sources isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion news sources.”

With mobile reporting tools, the latter is very possible (actually 4.6 billion news sources, as of Feb. 15, 2011).

Separating the wheat form the chaff to filter, curate and find quality news content in the flood of sources is another monstrous challenge in itself. … but maybe that’s next month’s carnival.

Disclosure: The b-b-b-b-billion gif idea was totally jacked from Zach Seward’s amazing Ignite presentation.