Technology Futures

The Huffington Post has a couple of interesting articles on the direction of journalism today. It is a weird time for news, as the old media and the new media continue to collide. There is much finger pointing going around, with many old media journalists and owners trying to make a fiscally sound transition to new media while simultaneously complaining that new media bloggers and news aggregation sites (like the HuffPost).

If you drop by the HuffPost, it looks just like CNN these days....a long way from the blogger beginnings of the site.

It is not at all clear to me that you can replace news organizations with a bunch of bloggers--news/opinion blogs work because they link to and comment on news articles. Now you can argue that the news articles are often heavily biased one way or the other, but there is still a different quality to even a biased news report compared to a blog post commenting on that report.

Maybe there is no longer much need for big national papers.....you have local news organizations (local radio, TV, news), and outfits like HuffPost aggregate local news into a "view" of national news.

But who then covers "national" and "world" news? Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. wants to charge for it, and the Wall Street Journal is already doing so successfully. And to muddy the waters even more, the FTC says it is considering providing subsidies to news organizations. It is hard to see how that could turn out well--do you really want a government bureaucrat deciding which newspapers and TV stations ought to get free government money at the expense of those stations and outlets that don't? And what if the government doesn't like the point of view your news organization embraces? This is a double-edged sword of exquisite sharpness.

Hat tip to Ed Dreistadt, who is always thinking about these issues.

Barnes and Noble is about to release an ebook reader called Nook. The bookseller and publisher wants to compete with the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader. It is easy to find people who say they love their Kindle, but I remain skeptical. I do think that within a few years, we will reading many more books using some kind of reader device, but I think the long-rumored Apple tablet is likely to crush these dedicated devices.

One of the arguments for dedicated book readers is that it is no different than lugging around a paperback--which I do all the time when I travel. But a paperback can be handled roughly--I don't have to worry about cracking the screen of a paperback, it never runs out of battery life, and it requires no charger. Once you have an ebook reader, you have to think constantly about charging it, loading the books on it, handling carefully, and even losing it--lose a paperback, and you are out $10. Lose or misplace your ereader, and you are out hundreds of dollars, and the hassle of replacing all the books stored on it.

A tablet device the size of the Nook or the Kindle that also does email, Web browsing, and handles light office tasks is going to be much more popular than adding another electronic device to your life.

Jeff Daily at App Rising reports that Utopia, the big community-owned fiber project in Utah, is having substantial success getting homeowners to pay for the fiber coming to their homes--to the tune of $3,000 per home. This may sound like a lot of money, but the market value of a residential home with fiber increases by $5,000 to $7,000, according to a Render study.

Homeowners routinely spend $5,000 or $10,000 or more on home renovations like kitchen makeovers and bathroom upgrades, and they rarely see even a 1 for 1 return on the investment. Brigham City, Utah is also building fiber to the home, and they are using a model I have long advocated--a pass by and tap fee. Brigham City has created a special assessment area and is charging property owners a fair portion of the fiber network, just as cities and counties do routinely with water and sewer pass by and tap fees. As citizens and businesses begin to read about the advantages of community-owned fiber (lower prices, more choice), it will become easier for these projects to start with user-based financing from day one.

Spain has decided that broadband is a "right," and is going to beginning legislating price and speed for bandwidth services. In the short term, this may get more affordable broadband to some rural areas of Spain, but in the long term, this kind of legislation tends to discourage innovation and competition.

In the U.S., it is tempting to look at rural areas the lack of broadband alternatives and think that legislation is needed, but there are options, like having local and regional governments make investments in broadband infrastructure and make it available to the private sector, which creates true competition. And this is already working and creating jobs in places like Danville, Virginia and Galax, Virginia. In both communities, open access fiber networks are creating private sector jobs and attracting new businesses to the downtown areas where fiber is available.