We continue to be fascinated by the ongoing confabulation regarding the future of journalism and publishing. (Let’s call it J&P for sake of this discussion.)
Is print dead?
Clearly not.
Is print dying?
In some niches print is staggering. In other niches print is doing far better than holding its own.
Will the ongoing digital publishing revolution really change the game?
We’d still bet the farm that it will, but not to the absolute exclusion of traditional print media.
There are some very, very canny folks out there working on improvements to the ‘old ways’ of how J&P is created, produced and consumed. To offer a simple example – Gutenberg would be astounded at something like The Domino Project being put together by Seth Godin and Amazon (more about the project on Seth’s blog). As revolutionary as Gutenberg’s press in 1440, projects like this one will change the way some books are written, delivered and consumed.
Neurobiologists and others of similar ilk have long concluded that our brains are hardwired to devote over 50% of brain circuitry to consumption, processing and interpretation of visual information.
Our attention, be it sometimes fleeting, is drawn to striking visual imagery.
Give most men a magazine with a complex data chart on one page and a Victoria’s Secret vixen wearing a scanty bombshell bra on the other page; let him ogle for 10 seconds and take it away. Offer him $500 cash to
describe the data table and he’ll say “what data table?”. Offer him $500,000 in cash to quote a sentence from the table’s explanatory text. He won’t.
Most fly fisher folk would probably be more distracted by one of the covers of Catch Magazine, but no doubt you get the point.
Back to the world of J&P. Ran across the following video this morning on the Flowing Data site – a site devoted to the creation of graphic models of complex (or not so complex) systems or collections of information.
One of their 10 best Data Visualization Projects of the year was this video – Journalism in the Age of Data. It’s long but worth your time if you have any interest at all in this area.
These guys and gals are a few of the Gutenbergs of today and are changing what and how we’ll be consuming content tomorrow.
We think it’s time to put some of these principles to work at the website level. Stay tuned.
