This is a piece I originally published in Contagious.
An understandable malaise in ad agencies surrounds all things digital. Low revenues on the one hand and a new answerability to metrics on the other are accompanied by a sense that digital formats remain largely underdeveloped, and that new, possibly unwelcome, surprises await. This is a moment of uncertainty. But it is also an opportunity to build an entirely new avant-garde. Continue reading
If a 153 year old newspaper is to adapt, to experiment, and take useful risks, it makes sense to work with startups. Since The Irish Times’ initial eight week experiment in 2012, both the NYT and the BBC have followed with their own ways of incubating early stage digital businesses. But beyond incubation there is a wider opportunity. Established media businesses ought to make themselves aware of startups’ ideas, skills, and ways of working. And they should support the startup community with a view to increasing the flow and cross pollination of ideas and knowhow.
The more openness, networking, and cross-pollination the better, or at least, so the relative success of the Silicon Valley startup scene versus that of Massachusetts appears to suggest [hat tip to Brian McDonnell, whose recommendation has put Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 on my reading list].
In short, a smart media organisation will help disruptors to network and learn.
With that in mind I approached Darren Mulvihill of StartupGrind‘s new Irish chapter, among other startup groups, about working with The Irish Times. The idea is to make The Irish Times’ building, right in the heart of Dublin, a place where startups, coders, entrepreneurs, designers, and financiers network. But beyond that, I wanted to apply The Irish Times particular focus on rigorous thought to a small set of key themes that matter to startups.
After a little experimentation, we are zeroing in on a format that seems to work. At the Grind At The Times event in early March 2013, Darren quizzes Barry O’Brien, Managing Director of corporate ventures at Silicon Valley Bank, on the challenges, pitfalls, and opportunities for Irish startups tackling US funding.
Let me know what you think. And if you have ideas for ways you would like to use The Irish Times as a space to meet and mingle with coders, entrepreneurs, designers, and financiers, let me hear it.
This is my op ed in The Irish Times, 7 January 2013.
In the early 1960s a Harvard graduate student named Ted Nelson developed the idea of ‘hypertext’, a system of digitised links between tidbits of information that would transcend the limitations of printed paper. The idea was wildly ambitious. A user could click various links within documents to pursue particular veins of information. But unlike the Web as we know it today, Nelson envisaged that each page would have multiple versions, annotations, and contain live snippets of other pages to which it ‘hyperlinked’. Continue reading
A brief note: I was asked to think about the hot topic in tech for 2012, and make a prediction for the hot topic of 2013 by Corriere della sera, an Italian newspaper.
It might seem passé, but I think the hot topic of 2012 has been mobile Internet. The ITU disclosed in June Continue reading
(This post also appeared in The Irish Times on 4 October 2012.)
LAST FRIDAY, at The Workman’s Club on Wellington Quay in Dublin, an Irish technology start-up company called GetBulb was announced as the overall winner of The Irish Times Digital Challenge.
GetBulb has produced a system that can rapidly create data visualisations suitable for both high-resolution print and for online interactive graphics in seconds. This start-up could, quite literally, change how media organisations across the globe approach design. Continue reading
I PREVIOUSLY POSTED THIS ON THE HUFFINGTON POST. RE POSTED HERE. Some months ago I set up The Irish Times Digital Challenge to invite digital entrepreneurs to propose ways to work with The Irish Times. Almost 81 early stage digital companies applied, of which 14 were invited to pitch in person. From this a final five of startups were selected to enter the building for eight weeks. I will blog here each week with video updates of the startups progress. Continue reading
The Irish Times is a media company with a long history. To get a sense of this reflect on the fact that it was already half a century old when one of its printing presses was burnt down during the 1916 Rising, when the rebels used its massive rolls of newsprint as barricades. In 1994, the same year that the Mosaic/Netscape browser first began to bring PC users to the Web, The Irish Times launched a digital edition in 1994. It was among the very first papers to do so. And like many media organisations, The Irish Times participated in and suffered from the dot com bubble. The Irish Times’ Facebook Timeline shows these milestones back to 1859.
The Irish Times is taking the next steps in its development as a media organisation. As small signs of this advance see the announcement today by the online editor of a new uniform commenting system, last’s week debut of a new morning brief using Tumblr, and the gradual enrichment of stories on Irishtimes.com with new embedded content, as this example shows. Tomorrow The Irish Times will announce something novel: The Irish Times Digital Challenge. Continue reading
Recently I have been looking at the newspaper as a service and as a business (for reasons that will become apparent later). Something is becoming clear. While the Internet makes information plentiful, and this in turn may be a challenge to some aspects of the newspaper business, deep insight and trust remain as scarce as they have ever been. Indeed, the value of deep insight and trustworthy information may have increased in the digital era.
This post, by the way, also appears in the Huffington Post today.
“Commodity news” made up of superficial coverage and parsed press releases is plentiful online. But deep insight remains sufficiently rare that some publications can charge for it. Thus, The Financial Times and The Economist remain essential reading despite the availability of zero cost alternatives. This deep and explanatory journalism can only be built by an expensive newsroom staffed by veteran reporters who have built expertise and relationships with sources over many years. The newspaper that is viable in the digital age must maintain a level of expertise in its newsroom that can not be accessed elsewhere. [read more]
