28 Jun Oxford Tablet Summit – Key Messages
Some key messages from the Oxford Tablet Summit by INNOVATION.
• Paper will stay. It will never die. But the business model and content proposition has changed. Tablets offer publishers an opportunity to recapture the reading of a defined product, with defined pagination, frequency and quality. Online you browse, on tablets people read.
• We have to reinvent the way we tell stories. It’s the journalism, not the platform. News you can read, watch and touch.
• Produce more for those who pay and less for those who do not pay.
• Paper as premium, tablet as premium, online and mobile as mass medium. Haute couture vs pret à porter.
• INNOVATION value equation: Who, What, Where, When – comodity – free; How, Why and What’s Next – premium – paid.
Cooperation is not integration. Digital is the only multimedia platform. Change from media companies to information engines.
• The iPad cannot save the news media industry, but the news media industry might just save the iPad.
• We live in an age of constant digital content distractions. The iPad is the world’s greatest distraction. But strong content can combat distraction. Newspapers and magazines have that content to focus attention and help people disconnect and get back to reading a publication from beginning to end, rather than just browsing.
• We have to promote the integration of journalist, graphic and technology profiles inside the newsroom in order to empower the possibilities of our everyday work.
• Become applications creators, stress flexibility, enhance the user experience, organize your IT staff to deal with the day-today, expand the technical staff’s horizons.
• Tablets are one step more in the evolution to a multiplatform brand. We need a multimedia newsroom to create content for the new formats.
• CMS systems are the multimedia ‘printing plants’ of the future.
Are you ready for the change? Let’s check:
1. How can you handle new platforms when your newsroom still thinks print first?
2. How can you handle new platforms when your website people still think online first?
3. How can you handle new platforms when print and web newsrooms are still not integrated?
4. How can you handle new platforms when your sales people still don’t sell multimedia packages?
5. How can you handle new platforms when your journalists and managers don’t talk to each other?
6. How can you handle new platforms when your IT people want to control everything?
7. How can you handle new platforms when your visual journalists are still monomedia storytellers?
8. How can you handle new platforms when your journalists are not able to create unique, relevant and compelling content?
9. How can you handle new platforms when you are not organized as a 24/7 multimedia operation?
10.How can you handle new platforms when you don’t spend money on research, training and innovation?
• We have few storytellers able to write code (and we need more coders willing to tell stories).
• Good apps are non-linear, you can access content from anywhere in the app.
• Good apps don’t require the user to learn, if you need instructions then it’s poorly designed.
• Content is everything, designing for the tablet begins with sketching the outline of an article.
• Good storytelling is all about the diferent layers of information that your readers will peel through your articles.
• New digital narratives and new grammar: Each piece of information must take it’s place in a chain that makes the article an amazing storytelling experience for your reader. Most important, ideas. Finding the best way to tell a story.