A couple weeks ago, David Brauer and Taylor Carik hosted the Other Future of News conference, a response to Minnesota Public Radio’s Future of News event in mid-November. The conference was divided into three sessions, including organizational change, tech tools and content. Here’s a couple brief highlights from the second and third sessions. Please note, I was only able to upload some of the presentations because of YouTube’s 10-minute limit and I didn’t make it for all of the presentations.

Programming for Robots

Julia Schrenkler (@juliaschrenkler), an interactive producer at American Public Media, emphasized the importance of data portability and searchability when uploading content on the Web.

“Everything you do has to be understood by robots… The search terms, the news robots, the robot editors, everything in the future is about the bots… Your data has to be able to speak to those bots.”
- Julia Schrenkler

Things to consider when uploading content to the web:

1) Communicating with robots
2) Easy migration to new tools
3) Stability of the code
4) Understanding the terms of service
5) Understanding user preferences
6) Fast and easy support
7) Adaptability to new technologies

Designing for readers

Matt Quintanilla (@blamedesign), a former print designer at the Star Tribune and current graphic designer at the Minnesota Science Museum, argued that the emphasis on design from printed newspapers has not translated to the Web because of technological limitations.

“When you’re talking about newspapers, magazines and really any news media, you really want to build for readers… The front page of the newspaper compared to the front page of the Web site of that newspaper is pretty much night and day.”

As part of his Paper News proposal for the 2010 Knight News Challenge, Quintanilla suggested a content and design framework that would allow news organizations to produce different layouts throughout the day. The proposal would be a Web-based framework, independent from each site’s content management system, that would allow news organization’s to easily re-design their homepage. In addition, it would allow for greater advertising potentially because commercial content could be placed where it’s most effective.

Paper News is an interesting approach to the future of news design and it could co-exist with “the robots” because it’s separate from the CMS. My primary concern with the proposal would be the additional emphasis placed on maintaining a “destination site.” Design is clearly important, but I’d like to see less focus placed on the homepage and more emphasis placed on individual stories that might serve as an access point to the site. For example, an excellent breaking news story could bring more people to the site if it were designed effectively. In addition, projects like the Star Tribune’s Liberia project and WCCO’s Bridge Retrospective could do the same if there was a framework able to produce similar stories more efficiently.

Albert Sun (@albertsun), co-founder of CoPress, suggested creating a set of open source Flash templates for his Knight News Challenge proposal (#KNC10) to allow more news organizations to produce extensive interactive graphics. Using a similar concept, there’s definitely potential for a universal framework to make interactivity more easy to implement with current content management systems and help improve the user experience.

Developing new audiences

Julia Nekessa Opoti (@Nekessa), freelance writer and publisher at Kenya Imagine, referenced a study by University of Minnesota professor Katherine Fennelly that said immigrants, specifically Latinos, Africans and Asians, will re-shape the state of Minnesota in the next 10 to 20 years. As a result, news organizations must appeal to these changing audience if they want to increase readers to keep the general population informed.

There’s an increasing digital divide, especially when it comes to information. We’re going to cut out a lot of people if we concentrate [too] heavily on the Internet and if we forget about the other small mediums.

This is an interesting approach to the future of news and something to consider. The type of coverage related to violence and crime in minority communities will need to change. There appears to be three approaches to the future of news that could resolve this problem:

1) More niche publications, such as small newspapers and magazines, could appeal to these growing audiences and cover issues important to these communities.

2) Traditional news organizations could alter their coverage to appeal to new audiences. Although this seems rather obvious, it would be somewhat problematic and difficult to implement. One of the current problems with mainstream news organizations is that they’re too broad and cannot capture a narrow advertising base. This would significantly expand the audience, specifically with a print publication, and make it more difficult to identify readers.

3) This appears to be a central argument for reducing the digital divide. News organization, foundations and/or corporations could help provide broadband to minority communities and develop new audiences with advertising potential. Any organization that decided to do this, such as Yahoo! or Google, would play a very powerful role in the future of news.

Curating niche content

Paul Schmelzer (@iteeth), editor of the Minnesota Independent, started a blog almost seven years ago called Eyeteeth: A journal of incisive ideas. The blog, one of roughly 30 independent art blogs, started broadly and developed a very niche focus. The site is most commonly known for its “Bits” segment that aggregates interesting links to relevant works of art.

Other #OFON presentations on technology tools included:
1) “Automating access to public data” – Steve Clift, E-Democracy
2) “Using Twitter” – Tom Scheck (@tomscheck), Minnesota Public Radio
3) “Mturk and Dapplr for reporters” – Ed Kohler (@EdKohler), The Deets
4) “Why your site design sucks” – Justin Heideman (@justinph), Walker Art Center

Other #OFON presentations on content included:
1) “Journalism cooperatives” – Jon Collins, Watch Cat
2) “Making the most of online video” – McKenna Ewen (@mckennaewen), Ewen Media
3) “Fitting in to a media diet” – Bennett Gordon (@BennetG), Utne Reader
4) “Entertainment and the news” – Jeff Horwitz, Minnesota Public Radio
5) “Immigrants and the changing media audience” – Julia Nekessa Opoti (@Nekessa), Freelance Writer