Lost in Phoenix

Think AOL, and you probably think of that famous phrase (and cheesy ‘90s romance movie), “You’ve got mail.”

I myself remember my family getting innumerable AOL CDs in the mail. But then, I also remember when Alta Vista and Lycos were important search engines and when Netscape Navigator was nipping at IE’s heels in the browser race.

And that’s about the last time I remember taking AOL seriously, too.
But AOL is trying to pull itself out of the ‘90s. Having recently split from Time Warner, AOL is eager to let people know it’s with it, or happening, or whatever it is the cool kids say these days.

It wants to do all this with a single dot.

AOL will become Aol. in December. Yes, Aol. The period is crucial, despite the fact that “America on-line” is not a sentence.

The New York Times spoke to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, who is quite enamored of his period. (Now that’s what I call gender equality.)

Mr. Armstrong said he liked to describe the period as “the AOL dot” because “the dot is the pivot point for what comes after AOL,” whether it is e-mail, Web sites or coming offerings that will “surprise people.”

Personally, I think Yahoo! did the whole punctuation thing to death already.

Gone will be the triangular logo that has long been the symbol of slow internet, HTML-incapable e-mail and a hundred obnoxious smileys.

Instead, “Aol.” appears emblazoned across various images deemed relevant to today’s society – such as a goldfish. Or a View-Master.

This is the work of the same advertising group that developed (Product)Red to raise money for AIDS research in Africa. Journalism? I’m in the wrong business. I should get paid millions of dollars for putting extra punctuation in things.

I wonder if fantasy writer Ursula Le Guin will seek to sue AOL for infringement. Before the internet even was, she wrote about a magical place called “the Forest of Aol.” Just try to read that without pronouncing the forest’s name “A-O-L.” I’d say her work has been forever changed by branding.

The irony is that AOL itself may be less changed by its rebranding than Le Guin’s novels are. It’s hard to know if this image shift bring users back to AOL. AOL (and Yahoo, according to Jeff Jarvis, who just wrote about AOL’s decision) used to be about community. Facebook, Flickr and dozens of other sites have since encroached upon that territory, doing “community” better than AOL did. More than the rebranding, I’m curious to see how AOL redefines itself – if it does at all. According to the ad agency’s creative director, Jordan Crane, AOL wants to be “a mix of do-it-yourself and high production values, crazy stuff and elegant stuff, simple and engaging and bizarre — all the things the Internet is.”

It will be interesting to watch what the company ultimately touts as its strength. “Elegant crazy engaging stuff” sounds more like BoingBoing than anything else.

I can’t think of anything (short of BoingBoingishness) that would draw me to AOL at this point. It and its users* have been the butt of my jokes for far too long for that. I am rather proud to be one of the critics that AOL Chief of Staff Maureen Marquess refers to as “the snarkies.”

*Apologies to those of you who do not spell as if you were an LOLcat.

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Sarah came to visit me in Phoenix. One day, while we were driving around aimlessly, she asked me what was in Mesa.

I shrugged. No clue. Never been there.

We plugged it into my GPS and took off.

We landed somewhere in downtown Mesa late Friday afternoon. The city was quiet; shops were closed and no one was about.

No one real, anyway.

We quickly met some of the permanent inhabitants of downtown, though: the statues that the city of Mesa has purchased and put on public display. They range from horses scenes from daily life in Mesa.

You can read more about the Permanent Sculpture Collection on the city’s Web site.

Time now for a brief commercial: I love the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism (and Mass Communication) at Arizona State. Why? Well, there’s the cutting edge tech and the fact that it’s way warmer than my other grad school option, Northwestern in Chicago.

But what really sets the school apart is its connections. Monday, Oct. 19, my 21st Century Media class with Tim McGuire had a special guest: Jeff Jarvis, of “What Would Google Do?” fame, via Skype.

Jarvis has some fascinating ideas about the future of media. Especially controversial is his assertion that newspapers should kill their print editions themselves and get online before ad revenue makes it impossible for them to continue to print.

But, as much as it pains me to say, the Internet isn’t going to be the saviour of news. It’s important to allow people to interact with, not just observe, what is on a site. No matter how attractive a Web site may be, no matter how much spiffy content may be on it, if the viewer can’t interact with it, it’s no more engaging than a hard copy of the paper.

At the same time, a paper’s offer of interactivity is no good if the content isn’t worth interacting with. Both factors have to be present.

As a student-journalist with a digital media obsession, I really get caught up in Jarvis’ theory that newspapers need to be a platform. Platforms, according to Jarvis, are flexible designs that anyone can apply to fill his need. Google Maps is a platform because it can be “mashed-up” and adapted to fulfill an almost infinite number of needs.

But Google doesn’t charge for the right to play with its maps code. It offers it free for the taking. Its price (or lack thereof) one very important aspect for a platform. Charging for a platform is a way of making some people ineligible to use it. That breaks craigslist founder Craig Newmark’s first principle: “Get out of the way.” If you create a fantastic platform that you want people to use, and if people want to use it, then let them. Don’t interfere. Make it easy for them to get involved, and then back off.

Newspapers need to decide what business they’re in, says Jarvis. In my opinion, we need to be asking, “How can papers better serve readers?” Newspapers are currently trying to answer this question, but for the wrong reason – so that they can accumulate more eyeballs, and sell more ads. I think that in order to succeed, they’re going to have to realize that they’re in the business of helping consumers, not selling advertising.

I asked Jarvis, in his call with our class, if he could more clearly define what a platform for newspapers would look like. One phrase in his answer jumped out at me: “Anything that helps other people succeed.”

Newspapers should help readers succeed. What a novel idea!

(In the interest of full disclosure, I must note that portions of this blog post are adapted from a paper I wrote for McGuire’s class. It seemed applicable to my blog, so I figured more exposure couldn’t be a bad thing!)

This 3/4 replica of the Vietnam Wall was only in Phoenix for an extended weekend before it moved on to Houston, Texas. Rebekah Zemansky and I went to visit it Saturday, August 19 before heading out to shoot assignments for our journalism boot camp class.

It turned out to be a pretty amazing thing to photograph, although I will make a suggestion to others with this opportunity: Do not plan on spending an hour at a reflective, black wall surrounded by a black rubber walkway at midday in the sun when the temperature hovers around 104. One lovely lady (the one with the flag umbrella in the following slideshow) had her son buy me a bottle of water because I looked so flushed.

Rebekah suggested we get some interviews, and I went along for the hell of it. I learned that two years of experience at my college paper has given me a rather handy formulaic way to approach people for interviews, but it doesn’t make me any more comfortable with the thought. However, we managed some really nice interviews. Both Daniel Pratt and Warren Seiz were great to interview and gave us some good information as well as insight. Part of what I love about being a journalist is being able to talk to people who have stories that you can’t possibly imagine. Being a soldier is a prime example of such a story.

This is my cut of our project. I will admit to loading it with more of my own photos than Bekah’s, simply because I felt like my blog should probably showcase my own work. Also, she’s hoping to get our collaborative cut picked up by an outside media source.

While this is a bit more extensive than most of my posts will be, this is generally the kind of thing I hope to continue presenting here.

Welcome to Lost in Phoenix, a blog about finding the future.  Okay, perhaps that sounds a bit pretentious and lofty.  I hope to focus this blog on exploring the many applications of multimedia.  I’m planning on doing this in two ways:

- Wandering around town, getting myself lost (which I do so well anyway), and finding different ways to document the process.

- Reading and writing responses to articles about digital media and the future of journalism.

So to kick things off, I’m going to list off my pet peeves.   Because nothing gets the ball rolling like a good list of peeves.

1. The sentiment that sticking a camera in someone’s hand creates multimedia journalism worth watching.

2. Thinking that more media equals more engaging media, or that every story needs a multimedia component.

3. Inappropriate use of multimedia.

4. People who don’t understand multimedia but think they do. (Fortunately, I do not currently know any of these.)

5. People who do understand multimedia but have no idea how much time putting a quality product together takes. (Fortunately, I do not currently know any of these, either.)

Feel free to add your own peeves, journalism-themed or not.  Therapy sessions are always encouraged.  ;-)