Technology Will Save Newspapers, Right?
Posterous has only been a round a month so far, but it's already gaining adherents among bloggers, and in particular, micro-bloggers. The company offers a way for bloggers to go mobile and post via email or text messaging -- for free. Posterous is part of a broader movement to simplify the transition to digital media for everyone, including journalists.
Bloggers from major platforms can use it -- Blogger, WordPress, Movable Type, Xanga, TypePad, and LiveJournal. It is also compatible with Twitter -- the largest micro-blogging service -- and Flickr, the photo-saving and sharing service owned by Yahoo. The Flickr connection highlights Posterous's multimedia capacity, as you can post video, photo images, music and other audio files as well as text to your blog over your mobile device.
In another development, Verve Wireless is trying to simplify the transition to the mobile web for newspaper companies. Bolstered by a $3 million investment from the Associated Press, Verve reportedly serves 4,000 newspapers, leading a New York Times blogger to speculate that it may represent a way to save the newspaper industry.
Another innovative approach aims to utilize cloud computing to enable better journalism. That's the announced goal of a partnership between Google and the Telegraph Media Group. The idea is to allow reporters to access their email and share documents with each other through Google's suite of applications.
Perhaps this could be called the "collaborative cloud computing model," but no one is asking me.
Meanwhile, Gannett is investing in Mogulus, an online video platform. The newspaper chain claims that already its reporters in the field "are equipped with video cameras, laptops and broadband wireless connections..." Here's hoping they also have iPods, iPhones, Backberries, and plenty of Red Bull, which they'll need in order to simultaneously manage all that technology.
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I could go on and on with these kinds of daily news snippets, but you get the picture. The media industry is desperately trying to catch up with the curve. Thanks to my BNET colleague Erik Sherman, today I'm even aware that a catfight has broken out between two competing services aimed at helping journalists connect with potential sources. Called ProfNet and HARO, these efforts are sort of like an updated "direct mail" approach to journalism -- send a query out to thousands of hungry PR professionals, hoping to draw in the catch o' the day.
Whatever.
Call me a curmudgeon, but I can't see why I should care to follow someone around on, say, Twitter as they attend some random event -- unless, and this is key -- they are keen observers, reliable reporters, and ethical writers devoted to uncovering original material I can't already find somewhere else.
In other words, unless they are solid journalists.
Then again, maybe that will ultimately prove to be the point of all this converging technology -- to separate the real journalists from the crowd. To date, however, most of what I'm hearing is white noise.