by Jason Preston on May 7, 2008
If you’re tracking the recommended reading I have in my sidebar, you probably spotted the post on Poynter last week about the idea of using videogames for journalistic storytelling.
As a long time videogamer and someone who used to run a video game web site, I wonder if making videogames to inform people about journalism is really the right approach. The “serious games” market has suffered with the very community they hope to reach out to (the videogame community) because it tries to approach serious issues in a medium that people use for escape.
I think that journalism videogames developed in the same vein would suffer a similar affliction.
Which is not to say that they shouldn’t be made at all. Serious games have their purpose and it is a great one - interactive computer-based learning is undoubtedly going to be a key component in the way we teach people going forward.
But applied as a seasoning, think about what it could do culturally.
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by Jason Preston on May 5, 2008
Iam calling this sporadic, as-it-pleases-me to write it series “Link Lessons” because I think that with very few exceptions, newspapers have largely ignored the power of the web’s biggest currency: the link.
I think smart linking goes hand in hand with an emphasis on local coverage in the quest for newspaper survival.
This is going to sounds like a complete contradiction, but here goes: When are newspapers going to realize that they are competing with the AP, and stop paying for AP content when they could simply link to it?
Here’s why this is actually a good idea:
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by Jason Preston on May 2, 2008
Last week Scott Karp ruminated on the future of online advertising: will it be driven by entertainment or will it be driven by information?
He presents two good examples that represent each technique in the world of car advertising. If you want to get a handle on what I’m talking about when I refer to one or the other, you should go read his post.
Got it? OK. Here’s why I think that information advertising has a much bigger future on the web: it fits the nature of the medium.
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by Jason Preston on May 1, 2008
A few days ago the New York Times wrote about the Madison, WI based paper The Capital Times (and, I’m happy to say, the NYT actually linked out in their article).
Last Saturday The Capital Times joined the ranks of newspapers that have cut their print edition entirely and moved their operations entirely online.
While I’m excited to see newspapers taking this leap and moving their operations completely online, this is a worrisome statistic:
In its account of The Capital Times’s last daily press run, The State Journal reported that it had “succeeded in garnering most of The Capital Times’s former subscribers and will see its average daily circulation rise from 89,000 to at least 104,000 starting Monday.”
What the internet is really lacking thus far is a strong, mainstream subscription based service. I think that the two tools most likely to “save” the newspaper industry are RSS and phone-based internet access.
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