The Modern Journalist

Sports 2.0 Continued: Real-Time Stats and Updates

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I’ve been casually following the court case between major league baseball, the national football league and a fantasy company that has been fighting for the opportunity to sell its statistical products. On June 2, the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to hear the case effectively rendering the lower courts decision that the fantasy company’s rights superseded the rights of the sports leagues to control the players’ names and data.

This from the Associated Press story:

The lawsuit involves C.B.C. Distribution and Marketing Inc., a Missouri company unable to obtain a license from a subsidiary of Major League Baseball to use players’ names in C.B.C.’s fantasy baseball games.

The Missouri company sued, saying it did not need a license to continue to sell its fantasy baseball games on its Web site.

Companies are now free — it would seem — to offer up their own fantasy products without obtaining a license from the professional sports leagues.

I’ve written about what a modern sports page should have — ARG-like games, local high school and college fantasy leagues, What If Sports-type leagues — and now I’m more convinced of that.

But there’s another opportunity as well. Real-time play-by-play.

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Mobile Web. We Haven’t Figure Out the Regular Web.

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I’ve been perusing the feeds for the past week days watching news about the smart phone and mobile Web markets pile up.

It’s interesting to take a step back from the stream and just observe for awhile. I’ve been actively encouraging media companies to do just that — step away from the second-to-second chase of the Web. What I think I see coming — maybe by the end of this year — are the first major steps towards mobile computing platforms that begin to tap into some of the ideas that have been discussed for the past few years.

Let’s start with the macro: there’s a new name for the hardware devices that connect to the Web, mobile Internet devices (MIDs) that have attracted much attention thanks, I think, to Apple’s entry into the smart phone market.

However, Apple’s initial burst into the space has slowed with the Blackberry, after stumbling a bit, has increased its market share. But that’s hardly worrisome for Apple since its new 3G iPhone is rumored to be on the way.

But I digress. The mobile Web.

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Marketing Shift: Politics, Hackers, Business and Touchscreens

I have a new gig at Marketing Shift, a website that tracks what companies should be doing, emerging technologies that change the way we talk with businesses and missteps along the way. Each Friday, I’ll post links and descriptions from the blog, although you should add this to your RSS Reader as well.

Dems and GOP Reach Out With Social Media: Technology was supposed to democratize the election process, instead we live in a world where sound bytes can destroy a candidate and nobody can filter “promises” made by politicians.

Comcast: Answer the Phone When Hackers Call: Internet television station Revision3 was shut down by a Denial of Service (DoS) attack by a legitimate anti-piracy business; hackers exposed a hole in Comcast’s website. Which group did more damage? Hint: it wasn’t the hackers.

Murdoch on Hulu: Control Copyright and Beat Theft: iTunes and Amazon want to sell digital movies and television. Rupert Murdoch wants to give it away.

Computing: Reach Out and Touch Your PC: The mouse is an awful input device. Know why? It’s only used on one device: the computer. Every other terminal uses motion or your finger. Meet the future of the PC.

Borders Goes Online While Amazon Goes To Digital: Seven years after abandoning the Web, Borders is back online. Too bad Amazon has moved off the Web into portable, e-Reader hardware.

Abandon the Super User, Focus on Customers: Businesses should forget trying to impress the digerati and develop technologies that drive them crazy. You know, for the rest of the people.

NY Times Invites Programmers to Build Reader Tools: The Times joined a small number of media outlets when it announced it would open up an API. All I can say is, it’s about time.

Conversations Companies Should Have: Social media is a pain in the ass, but like it or not, people are talking about companies. It’s not enough to listen. You have to know when to talk as well.

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Tech Companies Develop APIs for Public Records

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For the past few years, I’ve been telling newspaper and media companies that if they didn’t get on the ball, technology companies were going to usurp much of what they consider their domain because modern technology companies are bogged down with the “history” that newspapers oftentimes cling.

In fact, lots of folks smarter than me have been saying the same — or similar — things. JD Lasica has an interview with a start-up company doing working to develop APIs for public records. The location of the interview: Cisco.

News organizations ought to get behind this effort by releasing their own open API to public records in their communities. Now, here’s the important twist: Instead of just making the data available internally, for its staff to analyze and reinterpret, news publications ought to bring readers and users into such efforts.

But there’s an equally compelling reason for newspapers to get into the API and data game. If they aren’t going to invest in technology, they need to invest in the technology development community and that means latching on to the open source world.

If Microsoft — which built a business on proprietary software — can bite the open-source bullet, newspapers can surely follow.

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The Ad Problem: Why Smart Media Companies Are Fine

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Newspapers are facing a serious problem. The more publishers are looking at their bottom lines the more they are seeing this: shrinking black on the print side and a large red on the web side.

But that’s not always going to be the case, I hear people say. At some point, this whole online thing is going to take off — reporters are magically going to get the Internet, publishers will figure out the sales side and readers will come flocking to local news sites. All will be good in the world.

That’s what I hear. But it smacks of wishful thinking.

The move towards digital content is going to be bloody. Many papers aren’t going to make it. Reporters are going to lose their jobs. And new businesses will spring up. The folks at American Journalism Review agree with me — at least about the bloody part.

They predict a 15-year cycle of declining revenues and sporadic jumps, while modern media companies continue to reap the benefits of being digital.

Who’s to blame? The newspapers:

As early as the mid-’90s, Groves published research warning the newspaper industry of the growing challenge to its monopoly on classified advertising. “Newspapers had time to take control of the digital world and be the owner of that franchise,” he says, “and we didn’t do it.”

Now, he thinks, “that opportunity has come and gone.”

And the AJR isn’t the only organization that believes that. The folks at PaidContent.org have a report discussing the decline of local advertising across all mediums, which will impact newspapers the most.

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Blogs and Link Journalism

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Buster Olney and Jayson Stark are my favorite writers at ESPN.com. Mostly because they cover baseball and I can’t live without baseball (including MLB.tv, which for $10 per month lets me watch and listen to every baseball game each month through my computer, which is hooked up to my TV).

That I love two hardcore baseball writers isn’t particularly interesting to anyone but me. But there are two aspects of this that media folks might find interesting:

1. I pay to read their blogs because ESPN put them behind a content wall called Insider
2. I pay because they each have blog posts that contain nothing but links — with a brief analysis — about what is happening on each major league team

In other words, I get their news stories for free but I pay to read their blogs because I find a much greater depth of knowledge about a subject I like on the blogs. They are must reads for anybody who cares about baseball.

It’s called link journalism and it’s a great way to use blogs.

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Touch: The New Face of News Navigation

I often hear people who defend print say that computers can’t replace the feel of paper.

It’s easy to dismiss such talk as the ramblings of Luddites who staunchly refuse to enter the digital age. I’ve done it. I’m a child of the computer revolution. I’ve been reading and participating online since 1984. I had a Palm i705 with a portable keyboard in 2002, which let me get online wherever I was — even though the screen resembled my Commodore 64 from my childhood.

I never quite saw the problem with reading — and interacting — with text on a screen.

No matter my arguments, though, the reality is that some people are uncomfortable with the lack of digital reader portability, the “impersonal” nature of the technology and the barrier to entry for use. After all, we already know how a newspaper — or a book — works: pick it up. open it. read. repeat.

Three emerging technologies, though, will change how we interact with information and — if its developed correctly — will ease the concerns that people have.

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On Innovation and Engagement

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I’ve been thinking a lot about what Mark Cuban told me a few months back. You’ll see it referenced in previous and upcoming posts because it was maybe the best piece of advice I’ve been given when it comes to my book.

The essence of what he said as he shot down my initial ideas: what have you done that is radically different and gives users something they’ve never had before.

That’s easy for him to say. Broadcast.com — his baby — let millions of people with Internet connections listen to streaming audio of their hometown sports teams. As a Cincinnatian in San Francisco, that meant a great deal to me.

So whenever I think about the news and technology, Cuban’s voice is in the back of my head pushing me to think above, below, around and beyond whatever my initial idea was. He and Michael Robertson (of MP3.com fame) have probably influenced my thinking more than any two folks I’ve met because as far as I know, they’ve never once been sold on my idea.

When that happens, I’ll know I’ve got something.

Which makes me wonder who are the mentors — for lack of a better word — that are watching over the shoulders of the newspaper folks hoping to change the way we do news.

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Amazon, Borders: A Tale of Two Futures

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Borders Books is back. Back online anyway.

Seven years after striking a deal with Amazon to merge a large portion of its online operations, the brick-and-mortar bookseller announced it would strike out on its own in an attempt to sell books the new-fashioned way: through a website.

I’d characterize the reaction online as lukewarm.

Some folks love the new design, but that’s a little like dating someone and telling your friends that they were really nice. Others have said rightfully noted that design isn’t really what people want in an online book retailer. They want cheaper prices and they want feedback.

I’m sure Borders will find a niche online because the name is so well known. However, there are two nagging pieces of information swimming in my head, which if I worked for Borders, would cause me some concern.

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A Tale Of Free and Copyright Infringement

The first time I wrote about technology and entertainment was for the Austin Chronicle in 1997. It was my one — and only — feature piece for the weekly but it had a lasting impact on my view of this emerging world.

The piece was about Fringeware, a group of technophiles in Austin who — well, it’s hard to say exactly what they did. They had a bookstore and magazine. They held events. They were mostly involved in various ventures from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to Dell chip development.

But they were weird. Digital hippies. The kind of people who end up at Burning Man. People who viewed technology through the lens of the hacker and the Hacker Ethic: information should be free, developers should make tools, everyone should have the ability to tinker.

They turned me on to the authors who make up much of my reading list on this site.

So it was a shock when I joined Wired in 1999 to write about technology, entertainment and society and found that the entertainment industry — and its multinational conglomerate parents — had little in common with those Austinites.

I found myself writing about Napster’s litigation with the recording industry, Scour’s litigation with the movie industry, the Draconian Digital Millennium Copyright Act and a host of other tech-unfriendly topics.

Those and other early cases — MP3.com, Ed Felton, DeCSS — have laid two dangerous foundations that media companies accept as truisms today: you can’t make money by giving away content for free and technology companies can’t be trusted to distribute content.

This is not good.

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