MediaFlect

LA Times story on Greensboro NC’s News and Record experiment with community outreach through blogging contains a quote from an apparent newspaper reader saying the editor, John Robinson, is “like a pregnant teenager– lame excuse after lame excuse.”

I’m glad that today’s editors are no longer making excuses, but instead exposing themselves to critcism and addressing outrage. Even the letter from Newsweek leader Rick Smith on the qu’uran messup shows, I think, that openness leads this industry (eventually) to self-correction.

Are we doomed to always be composing for one medium prevoius to the most current one we’re using? A lot of observers, including Jeff Jarvis, write incisively about the anywhere, anyhow demands users place on news now. People want what they want, when they want it, HOW they want it.

But if we train ourselves and our staffs to provide news — or any media — on the larger screens of computers, or even TVs, then what happens when the majority of folks are consuming on cellphone screens, or maybe their watches, or even their glasses in some sort of 3-D holographic projection? What happens when the pen you carry projects whatever you want on whatever surface you aim at? Meaning, we have to consider a world in which not only information is sliced and diced, but the manner in which it’s presented may also be completely out of the control of whoever put it together. Alternately, we may have to program with sniffers, and adjust the presentation according to how the user is consuming it. Already, some do a masterful job on the smaller Palm or Blackberry screens. Others’ look like crap.