Monday, April 24, 2006

I screen, you screen

I screen, you screen, we all scream for more screens. Or, do we?

For years, researchers have tried all kinds of experiments to substitute good, old-fashioned ink on paper with some sort of electronic, pixellated, plasmatized gizmo that marries the readability and portability of print with the flexibility and timeliness of an interactive display.

The most recent variations on this long-running theme -- discussed yet again today in the New York Times -- even include a flexible e-newspaper that looks like a steam-rollered mousepad. It appears to be so pliable that a newsboy could roll it up, slip a rubberband around it and toss it under the bushes.

While it is heartening that newspaper folks increasingly recognize the need to compete with the interactive, mobile media, they need to stop trying to evolve their product into a unique, specialized instrument that requires its own power supply. Instead, they need to start putting news and advertising information onto the mobile platforms that people actually are willing to carry around.

As publications adapt to online and mobile presentation, they would be well advised to adapt their content to the native strengths of the medium in which they are to appear.

In revising its web site, the New York Times ditched its traditional long, gray lines of type in favor of short and colorful displays that billboard a number of articles and make navigation easy. Like many other major newspapers, the NYT is introducing video and other multimedia features.

At the other extreme of the continuum, Information Week, which ought to know better, is delivering a 96-page, PDF-style email containing an identical copy of its magazine, thus forcing readers to click through dozens of pages of slow-loading ads to squint at virtually unreadable text.

Remember what Louis Henri Sullivan, the father of the skyscraper, said back in the 19th Century? "Form ever follows function." Awfully good advice.

About Me

Alan D. Mutter is perhaps the only CEO in Silicon Valley who knows how to set type one letter at a time.
Mutter began his career as a newspaper columnist and editor at the Chicago Daily News and later rose to City Editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. In 1984, he became No. 2 editor of the San Francisco Chronicle.
He left the newspaper business in 1988 to join InterMedia Partners, a start-up that became one of the largest cable-TV companies in the U.S.
Mutter was the COO of InterMedia when he moved to Silicon Valley in 1996 to join the first of the three start-up companies he led as CEO.
The companies he headed were a pioneering Internet service provider and two enterprise-software companies.
Mutter now is a consultant specializing in corporate initiatives and new media ventures involving journalism and technology. He ordinarily does not write about clients or subjects that will affect their interests. In the rare event he does, this will be fully disclosed.
Mutter also is on the adjunct faculty of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.