I am going to fail and that is the most important thing I could do for The London Free Press these days.

Am I planning on failing? Of course not. But we have reached a stage in the evolution of mainstream media that demands experimentation. And experimentation invariably comes bundled with a healthy degree of failure. So I am hoping that 2010 will see an abundance of new projects; some of which will ruffle feathers within the ranks of our larger organization, some will alienate certain of our audience, and others will just plain fall flat.

But we will also have a few successes, and only by experimenting will we find out what will be successful and what will not be. If I reach my goal we will have a new experiment each month this year.

Let’s see what happens…

@SteveatLFPress

I’m often asked what the future might look like for newspaper companies, especially in an era where social media and digital technologies are developing at an exponential pace.  I firmly believe that we are less than five years away from a digital device in a form factor that would lend itself well to mass appeal and adoption.

LG Display 19" flexible electronic-paper screen

In my mind there are two camps vying for this space. One is the ‘tablet’ camp, touting a device that effectively replaces your computer with a lightweight, easy to carry ‘computer screen’ that operates like an over-sized iPhone.  The rumoured Apple iSlate is the next generation of such a device. Apparently we should expect a big announcement in this area from Steve Jobs and Apple on January 26th.

The other school of thought is that the traditional newspaper layout will live on in ‘digital paper’. The proponents of this approach are placing an emphasis on the portability, flexibility and familiar look and feel of this type of device.

A big leap forward in this area is expected now that LG Display has reportedly announced this week that they will begin mass production of a electronic paper screen later this year.

While it will take some time for manufacturers to integrate this screen into an actual device — complete with software and a power source — it allows us to envision a day in the not so distant future when a screen like this could be sitting on a kitchen table displaying our local newspaper.

And the really exciting part…this technology will probably be all but obsolete by 2015.

@SteveatLFPress

There has been much criticism over the time that I have worked here around the fact that we do not do a sufficient job adding hyperlinks within articles. We often post articles with an accompanying URL but do not take the extra time to ‘activate’ the URL through the use of hyperlink code. A brief explanation is in order as well as a promise of better things to come.

The current work flow for our content management system sees many of our articles added to the printed newspaper before they appear online. This is not some underhanded attempt to boost print circulation by withholding stories, but is merely a function of deadlines. Often times a reporter will be working on a story well into the evening. Occasionally they are trying to confirm details with sources, or they may simply be working on a particular story only after other assignments have been completed. For a variety of reasons these articles first appear in our print product. What then happens is an automated process that converts our printed paper to XML, which is then loaded up to our web site overnight.

The following morning our web team gets their first crack at the story in order to ’stage’ it (to use the interior design terminology) and make it more interactive.

Now, when a story is ready to be filed during the day it goes through a different process. The reporter posts the story on the site and alerts the online team, who then immediately begins the process of staging the article to optimize it for online reading.

Amongst the tasks they take on:

• activating any URLs included in the article
• looking for additional areas where linking could add context to the article
• adding related maps
• uploading associated documents to our Scribd account and inserting into the article
• linking the article to any related videos that have been shot and uploaded
• Adding the Livestream video player when live video will be broadcast
• connecting the article to related photo galleries
• inserting any ‘Twitter boxes’ to display tweets coming in real time from a reporter

Beginning shortly we will be changing the work flow such that all stories are ’staged’ in this manner when they are loaded; the hope being that you will no longer find an inactive URL as part of a story.

If you have any questions on this topic or how it can be improved upon, feel free to drop them into the comments or send me a message on Twitter.

@SteveatLFPress

As I tweeted about on New Year’s Day, I’ve resolved to blog more regularly this year. The newspaper industry is in a state of flux, and with the innovative business models and news delivery advances coming so fast it would be irresponsible not to document as much of this evolution as possible.

So I was thrilled when I read that a BlackBerry app for WordPress was released in beta this past fall. This is my first post with the app and so far so good.

Happy New Year everyone! Here’s hoping for an exciting and prosperous 2010.

@SteveatLFPress

Holy cow, these past 36 hours have been a complete blur.  We launched the new lfpress.com web site yesterday morning and while reviews have been decidedly mixed, I finally feel like we’re on a platform from which we can grow the way we need to.

I’m not going to post a whole heckuva lot right now because I need to get my compass realigned and need to absorb the feedback we’ve received.  What has been amazing to me is how polarizing of an issue this has become.  The response that we’ve received has been all over the map. Some people absolutely love the new design, with it’s wider layout and more intuitive navigation bar; others find it a hideous monstrosity and are calling for my immediate termination.

Anyway, I hope that most of you like where we’re trying to go. We’re far from being where I want us to be but this new site is a good step in the right direction.

@SteveatLFPress

Okay, I’m beginning to get very impatient while awaiting a Mac version of the Livestream.com Procaster solution. For those unfamiliar with our challenges, we have been using a Rogers RocketStick connected to a MacBook Pro to live stream events via the Livestream.com browser-based Flash encoder.

Whether the problem is with Rogers throttling us or with the browser-based Flash encoding itself, we were having more and more problems broadcasting live this spring. So we made a decision a few months ago to hold off on any further live video until Livestream.com released a full-fledged Mac application for real time Flash encoding. (They have a Windows version but we’ve stayed away from it thus far).

I had hoped to see that later in August, and now half way through September we still don’t have it. There were numerous times in the past few weeks where we could have gone live.

Patience is not something I do well.

@SteveatLFPress

Paul Berton wrote this column last month while I was away on holidays, but after having re-read it a few times I can’t help but think that it succinctly captures what it is that we’re trying to do here at The Free Press.

The summer has slowed the pace of progress for us with everyone just trying to make sure that they’ve covered off each others holidays, but I’m hopeful that fall will see us take this initiative to a whole new level, for the betterment of both Londoners as well as this company.

@SteveatLFPress

Two more lanes on the info highway

The London Free Press
01 Aug 2009

The so-called information superhighway, under construction now for more than a quarter of a century, seems to get another lane added almost daily. This week, The London Free Press jumped into one of those lanes, by launching a mobile site —…read more…

Until the events of yesterday I didn’t think it could be possible to be both sickened and proud at the same instant. But that was how I felt as I watch the events unfold in the mortifying case of the Tori Stafford abduction and alleged murder.

On the one hand, as a parent of two young children, and an uncle of four beautiful nieces whom I adore, I was visibly shaken and bordering on nauseous as I learned of the apparent fate of young Tori. This is the most horrific crime I can imagine and having been so close to the story for the past 42 days was at times more than I could handle. Our journalists are consummate professionals but I wasn’t prepared for the emotion of such a case. (The fact that I’m writing this post at 4:00 am speaks to that issue).

On the other hand I felt a tremendous sense of pride as I watched a newsroom kick into overdrive to find and deliver the facts of the story, and to do it’s best to provide whatever analysis could be proffered in a case such as this. Early in the day the team recognized – with no input from me – that these developments would play out largely online, given that a print edition would not come for another 18 hours or so.

So what resulted was a reporter sked (a journalism term for the assignments for the day) that focused heavily on a multi-platform approach:

• Reporters were dispatched with instruction to be involved with readers via Twitter
• Reporters were asked to file stories and photos from their BlackBerries
• Photogs were given direction to get photos and video uploaded from the field
• A live video stream was established in the newsroom with updates provided by Dan Brown, PJ Harston and other editors every 30 minutes to an audience that eventually reached over 8,000 live viewers
• A laptop with Final Cut Pro and a 3G Rocket Stick was prepared so video could be edited and uploaded from the field
• Our crack in-house team got busy aggregating the incoming photos into an expanding gallery
• Despite some legal uncertainty we did our best to offer a forum for often heated exchanges in a live chat room that accompanied our video stream
• We worked with our infrastructure team in Montreal to deal with the overwhelming amount of traffic our site received, nearly double our previous daily record
• We made our best attempt at live streaming the press conference, but internet connectivity just wasn’t there

In isolation none of these initiatives seems overly innovative; however what I watched play out was a newsroom that appreciated how digital and social media tools could help them tell stories. Over the next few days we’ll discuss what we could have done differently; we’ve already realized that we could have used Google Latitude on our reporters’ BlackBerries to mash up a map on our site with real time updates displaying where they were in London, Woodstock and Guelph. But for now that was as ‘multi-platform’ as I’ve seen from our newsroom.

@SteveatLFPress