News Indigestion? Flipboard's McCue on Web Dyspepsia
Was the Web Just an Unpleasant News Medium?
Flipboard’s Mike McCue is drawing lots of attention with his comments about the unhappy marriage of news on the desktop/laptop web:
“The problem with journalism on the Web today is that it’s being contaminated by the Web form factor”.
Of course, McCue’s got a big self-interest here. His product is a tablet product, one just picked by Apple as the App of the Year. And what his new application, just released, does elegantly is take print and make it beautiful — and ad-supportive — on the tablet, with little effort by the publisher (always a big point). It’s an experimental product, one that includes eight publishers, including the Washington Post (Sunday) Magazine, ABC News, All Things Digital, Bon Appetit, Lonely Planet, SB Nation, SF Chronicle/Gate and Uncrate. But, the self-interest, of course, is right out there. And the point is a compelling one.
Further:
“What I mean is, journalists are being pushed to do things like slide shows — stuff meant to attract page views. Articles themselves are condensed to narrow columns of text across 5, 6, 7 pages, and ads that are really distracting for the reader, so it’s not a pleasant experience to ‘curl up’ with a good website.
Journalism is being pushed into a space where I don’t think it should ever go, where it’s trying to support the monetization model of the Web by driving page views. So what you have is a drop-off of long-form journalism, because long-form pieces are harder to monetize. And it’s also hard to present that longer stuff to the reader because no one wants to wait four seconds for every page to load”.
Add McCue’s comments to the growing sense that the web — meaning desktop and laptop access — has been just an interim for news readers and news publishers. It’s been — in the optimistic scenario — the desert publishers had to trek through to get to a promised digital land, where balance of nature, the milk and honey of advertising and reader revenue could be restored. In this storyline, we experimented with the web, used it voraciously, but only in strange, alien-like ways — snippet-munching, quick in-and-out checking of news — rather than in the old, tried-and-true print ways, which leveraged the “tablet” reading metaphor borrowed from the Phoenicians.
It’s a great tale, with lots suffering, failed romances and a Hollywood ending.
Let’s not yet too far ahead of ourselves though. Early indications are that the tablet experience is indeed a definitively different news-reading one (“The Newsonomics of All-Access — & Apple“), with longer session times, longer stories read and more identification with branded news. Publishers tell me that all these phenomena are playing out — and all hasten to point to the steep, early adopter curve of 80% male, younger, affluent readers — confirmed by the early research of The Digital Publishing Alliance. Nobody believes that the mass audiences — 70 million tablets to be sold in the U.S. alone over the next two years — will dine on the news the same way as the 2010 iPad addicts. Yet, McCue’s point on form factor is essential; we’re led around to what we do by what we can do.
The desktop web has been the ultimate YellowPages/weather update/news check-in/bar bet paradise. Remember back to the ’90s, when we discovered we could go anywhere. It was liberating and mind-blowing. Now, perhaps comforted that the short-read, information-access medium will always be there (and on and through the tablet as well), we’re taking to a new opportunity, the opportunity to read digitally, in ways we find lean-back pleasurable.
Indeed, everything we thought — once again — about “the web” may have been wrong. We’re in such early stages of digital development and we keep on thinking, ah, humans, that we’ve reached an endpoint. (This year’s endpoint: Apple and Facebook will clearly rule the universe.)
The tablet, too, is no such endpoint, but it’s a great stop on the trip. For instance, who knows how HTML5 will revolutionize the browser experience and throw new twists into the story? How will Google rejigger its strategies in the tablet age? If 4G becomes omnipresent sooner than later, may all our digital habits change again? When the “final” story is written, though, we have a little evidence, in December, 2010, it may be written on the tablet.