Lost in Phoenix

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!)

Oh, Facebook. I love you, but you will never be Twitter.

Twitter, I love you, but your inflexible 140-character limit is, well, limiting.

But I wish you’d go to your separate corners and stop fighting each other.

Facebook’s attempt to steal Twitter’s audience was perhaps never more blatant than when they introduced Facebook Lite on September 10 of this year. Facebook Lite pares Facebook down to just the news feed — a welcome service for those who find the constant stream of application invitations irritating.

At the same time, Facebook enabled tagging friends in status updates — by using the Twitter-like “@name” command.

The result of both of these actions was quite the clash of titans, as the New York Times likened Facebook to “a balding hipster.”

Twitter, in contrast, seems built — by coincidence, I would argue — to undercut Facebook. Third-party applications like TweetDeck and the Selective Twitter Status Facebook app allow Twitter users to update their Facebook status directly from their Twitter account. (The latter one does so by pulling only those statuses with an “#fb” tag into Facebook.)

Well, Facebook is firing back. The Next Web announced Tuesday that Facebook is undergoing yet another update to their news feed. This update, while relatively minor, almost seems to be a reverse of the last one. Instead of making the site more like Twitter, it will remove the large update box from the top of the feed and replace it with a small button on the right-hand side. You can see screenshots of the coming changes on The Next Web’s site.

Perhaps Facebook has realized that right now, it doesn’t have to feel too threatened by Twitter. This Chicago Tribune graphic compares Facebook to Twitter and the once-giant of social media, MySpace. The graph shows Twitter, which is still struggling with figuring out how to monetize its users, sitting at 20.8 million unique users in August. By contrast, Facebook claimed 92.2 million.

That makes Twitter, with its bleeding-edge “left-wing technologist” proponents, still the underdog. If you like cheering for the underdog, or if, like me, you just have an extremely developed sense of irony, you can become a fan of Twitter on Facebook.

Of course, that doesn’t mean Facebook can’t fall from grace. You never know when the underdog is going to come out on top.

Mark Zuckerberg, watch your step.