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[This review was initially posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on March 19, 2010.] A raft of ideas at SXSW: The center of the journalism-and-tech world this week has been Austin, Texas, site of the annual conference South by Southwest. The part we're most concerned about — SXSW Interactive — ran from last Friday to Monday. The New York Times' David Carr gives us a good feel for the atmosphere, and Poynter's Steve Myers asked 15 journalists what they took away from SXSW, and it makes for a good roundup. A handful of sessions there grabbed the attention of a lot of the journalism thinkers on the web, and I'll try to take you on a semi-quick tour: — We saw some conversation last week leading up to Matt Thompson's panel on "The Future of Context," and that discussion continued throughout this week. We had some great description of the session, between Steve Myers' live blog and Elise Hu's more narrative summary. As Hu explains, Thompson and his fellow panelists, NYU prof Jay Rosen and Apture founder Tristan Harris, looked at why much of our news lacks context, why our way of producing news doesn't make sense (we're still working with old values in a new ecosystem), and how we go about adding context to a largely episodic news system. Michele McLellan of the Knight Digital Media Center echoes the panelists' concerns, and Lehigh prof Jeremy Littau pushes the concept further, connecting it with social gaming. Littau doesn't buy the idea that Americans don't have time for news, since they obviously have plenty of time for games that center on collecting things, like Facebook's Farmville. He'd like to see news organizations try to provide that missing context in a game environment, with the gamer's choices informed by "blasts of information, ideally pulled from well reported news stories, that the user can actually apply to the situation in a way that increases both recall and understanding." — NYU's web culture guru, Clay Shirky, gave a lecture on the value that can be squeezed out of public sharing. Matt Thompson has a wonderful live blog of the hourlong session, and Liz Gannes of GigaOM has a solid summary, complete with a few of the made-for-Twitter soundbites Shirky has a knack for, like "Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does," and "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." Once again, Jeremy Littau pulls Shirky's ideas together and hones in on their implications for journalism in a thoughtful post, concluding that while the future of journalism is bright, its traditional players are clueless. "I just don’t see a future for them when they’re trying to protect information as a scarce commodity," he writes. "The scarcity, in truth, is in media companies trying to create civic goods via user sharing." — Danah Boyd, who studies social media and youth culture for Microsoft, gave a well-received talk on privacy and publicity online. It doesn't have much to do directly with journalism, but it's a brilliant, insightful glimpse into how web culture works. Here's a rough crib of the talk from Boyd, and a summary from TechCrunch. There's a bunch of cool nuggets in there, like Boyd's description of the "inversion of defaults" in privacy and publicity online. Historically, conversations were private by default and public by effort, but conversations online have become public by default and private by effort. — One of the big journalism-related stories from SXSW has been AOL and Seed's efforts to employ a not-so-small army of freelancers to cover each of the 2,000 or so bands at the festival. The Daily Beast has the best summary of the project and its goals, and TechCrunch talks about it with former New York Times writer Saul Hansell, who's directing the effort. Silicon Alley Insider noted midweek that they wouldn't reach the goal of 2,000 interviews. One of the big questions about AOL and Seed's effort is whether they're simply creating another kind of "content mill" that many corners of the web have been decrying over the past few months. Music writer Leor Galil criticized it as crass, complaining of the poor quality of some of the interviews: "AOL is shelling out cash and providing great space for potentially terrible content." David Cohn of Spot.Us compared AOL to the most notorious content farm, Demand Media, concluding that journalists shouldn't be worried about them exploiting writers, but should be worried about their threat to the journalism industry as a whole. — One other session worth noting: "Cult of the Amateur" author and digital dystopian Andrew Keen gave a sobering talk called "Is Innovation Fair?" As Fast Company's Francine Hardaway aptly summarized, he pointed to the downsides of our technological advances and argued that if SXSW is a gathering of the winners in the cultural shift, we have to remember that there are losers, too. — Pew's paywall findings: The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism released its annual "State of the News Media" study, and it's a smorgasbord of statistics about every major area of journalism, from print to TV to the web. A summary of summaries: The study's six major emerging trends (expanded on by Poynter's Bill Mitchell), some of its key statistical findings, and the Columbia Journalism Review's seven eye-popping statistics from the study. The biggest headline for most people was the study's finding that only 7% of the Americans who get their news online say they'd spring for a favorite news source's content if it went behind a paywall. (The AP writeup has a few more statistics and some analysis about online loyalty and advertising.) Jeff Jarvis, a longtime paywall opponent, wondered why newspapers are spending so much time on the paywall issue instead of their "dreadful" engagement and loyalty online. Former WSJer Jason Fry breaks down the study to conclude that the basic unit of online journalism is not the site but the article — thus undermining the primary mindset behind the paywall. Poynter's Rick Edmonds, who writes the study's section on newspapers each year, said he's done with dead-and-dying as an industry theme. Instead, he said, the problem with most newspapers is that they are becoming insubstantial, shells of their former selves."They lack the heft to be thrown up the front porch or to satisfy those readers still willing to pay for a good print newspaper." Editor & Publisher pulled some of the more depressing statistics from Edmonds' chapter. Yet Lee Rainie, who co-authored the study's section on online economics, said he was still optimistic about journalism's future. — A bleak look at local TV news: Another fascinating journalism study was released late last week by USC researchers that found disappointing, though not necessarily surprising, trends in Los Angeles local TV news: Crime, sports, weather and teasers dominate, with very little time for business and government. USC's press release has some highlights, and co-author Martin Kaplan offers a quick, pointed video overview of the report, concluding with a barb about wants and needs: "I want ice cream. I need a well-balanced meal. Apparently the people of Los Angeles want 22 seconds about their local government. Maybe if they got more than that, they'd want more than that." FCC Commissioner Michael Copps was "flat-out alarmed" by the study and vowed some vague form of action. Jay Rosen was ruthless in his criticism on Twitter, and Los Angeles Times critic James Rainey used the study as the basis for a particularly well-written evisceration of local TV news. Rainey had the most promising suggestion, proposing that a cash-strapped TV station find a newspaper, nonprofit or j-school interested in partnering with it to build an audience around more substantive, in-depth TV news. The iPad, magazines and advertising: As we expected, lots and lots of people have been ordering iPads since they went on sale — 50,000 in the first two hours and 152,000 in three days, according to estimates. We're also continuing to get word of news organizations' and publishers' plans for apps; this week we heard that the AP will have an app when the iPad rolls out next month, and saw a nifty interactive feature for the digital Viv Mag. (The Guardian has a roundup of other video iPad demos that have come out so far.) SXSW also had at least three sessions focusing on media companies and the iPad: 1) One on the iPad and the magazine industry focused largely on advertising — here's a DigitalBeat summary and deeper thoughts by Reuters' Felix Salmon on why advertising on the iPad could be more immersive and valuable than in print; 2) Another focusing on the iPad and Wired magazine, with Salmon opining on why the iPad is a step backwards in the open-web world; 3) And a third on iPad consumption habits and their effects on various industries. — Reading roundup: One ongoing discussion, two pieces of news and one smart analysis: The conversation sparked by Netscape co-founder Marc Andreesen's advice for newspapers to forget the printed paper and go all-in with online news continued this week, with Frederic Filloux noting that "there are alternatives to envisioning the transformation of the print media as only a choice between euthanizing the paper product or putting it on life support." Steve Yelvington looked at setting up separate print and online divisions (been there, done that, he says), Tim Kastelle spun Andreesen and Google's Hal Varian off into more thoughtful suggestions for newspapers, and Dorian Benkoil took the opportunity to marvel at how much things have changed for the better. The first piece of news was Twitter's launch at SXSW of @anywhere, a simple program that allows other sites to implement some of Twitter's features. TechCrunch gave a quick overview of what it could do, CNET's Caroline McCarthy looked at its targeting of Facebook Connect, and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram was unimpressed. Second, ABC News execs revealed that they're planning on putting up an online paywall by this summer. paidContent has a detailed interview with ABC News digital chief Paul Slavin. And finally, newspaper vet Alan Mutter examines the often-heard assertion that small newspapers are weathering the industry's storm better than their larger counterparts. He nails all the major issues at play for small papers, both the pluses (lack of competition and broadband access, loyal readership) and the minuses (rapidly aging population, some local economies lacking diversity). He ultimately advises small papers to ensure their future success by innovating in order to become indispensable to their communities: "To the degree publishers emphasize short-term profits over long-term engagement, they will damage their franchises – and open the way to low-cost online competitors."

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