Two more interesting things they’ve done:

-Allowed people to turn their voice-mail comments about stories in the LFP and turn them into podcasts with LFP staff commentary.

-Begun to do video news coverage of things too small for our local stations to bother with (yet big enough to be interesting)

A presentation by Steve Groves (director of Internet media) on it can be found here: http://prezi.com/54980/

http://www.lfpress.com/

I’m going to send this post back in Steve’s direction. The LFP might use some of Google’s ideas…

I didn’t mean to suggest that the Washington Post hasn’t done anything creative in terms of displaying content by any means — I was thinking specifically of the tag-cloud view of headlines and some of the other interface projects that I remember being part of the original Remix effort. I probably could have phrased that part a little better.

And thanks for including that link to some of the projects that Peter has been involved in. It is a great list.

http://push.cx/2009/washington-post-update

Among the recent efforts there, I really enjoy the political appointments database:

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/2009/federal-appointments/

For Google, this news timeline thing is right in its comfort zone/focus: Index, organize, and deliver existing content; whereas for newspapers, their comfort zone/focus has always been content creation, with a little bit of delivery thrown in. Those focuses are in the blood and culture of these respective companies. Take either one out of its comfort zone and put it in a different arena, and it’ll likely struggle. “Geek talents” at newspapers probably feel a little (or perhaps a lot) like visual designers at Google:

http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

So if you pit a content-creation company that’s trying to do tech stuff as well against a tech company on what is essentially a tech problem, my money would be on the tech company every time.

While newspapers definitely need to be much more tech-minded than in the past, not being in a world of infinite resources, I don’t know if their future lies in them becoming capable of going toe-to-toe with the likes of Google on technological innovation. Perhaps it’s about taking being more adept at taking the innovations that come out of the tech sector and using them to allow you to better excel at what you are good at, like how blogging software allowed millions of content creators to disseminate their content. Those content creators didn’t arrive at that point by becoming developers and programmers. They did it by employing the tools created by developers and programmers.

My nomination for most innovative, user-centered news reader from the future is . . . . Spectra.

Not surprisingly, it was not developed by a newspaper.
Editors don’t think in terms of unbundling and letting users re-bundle content like this. Developers do.

LINK
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i//msnbc/Components/spectra/spectra.html

Ironically, a newspaper has done a time-line navigation of their content, El Comercio in Peru. They launched a version of it in 2007. The time slider was a bit slow to load, but the current version on the home page is quite quick.

I agree that the level of creativity needs to increase, but I think one thing holding them back is the Web 0.5 content management systems that many newspapers use. They are clumsy, monolithic systems that get in the way of tapping network effects. They not only get in the way of developers, but they also get in the way of journalists.

However, I would say that there has been a change in the last few years that we now have editors asking for new web and interactive features instead of those initiatives being driven primarily from outside the newsroom. The recession is causing some journalists to revert back to ‘the internet is the enemy’ thinking, but I do think (maybe I should say hope) that we’ve turned a corner.

There’s no logical reason that news companies can’t combine geek talent and journalism talent into something that is greater than the sum of its parts, yet it almost never happens. I suspect this has a great deal to do with the fact that, as a group, we journalists can be some of the most unpleasant people on the planet, and the geeks (who can work elsewhere) won’t put up with our shit for very long.

If news companies want to progress and survive, they’re going to have to deal with the swaggering bullies, curmudgeons and beancounters they’ve placed in charge of their franchise. Newsrooms may have been conducive to creativity once, but that’s not what I’m hearing or seeing anymore.

Bottom line? If you want good geek talent, you not only have to pay for it, you have to let it achieve things.

“Can an enterprise do that? Can they lob themselves at targets without worrying about their infrastructure? Not sure. Look at all the burning debris in the ‘water’ of the last few months’ financial turmoil. Big companies are in the wreckage.”

http://www.chrisbrogan.com/the-beauty-of-pirate-ships/

http://topics.latimes.com/entertainment/people/josh-brolin/2008-06

http://mostpopular.ninemsn.com.au/

maybe it’s just when google do it, people take more notice?