Last week the Pew Research Center published its annual State of the News Media report for 2012. It’s a broad piece of industry self-analysis that documents trends in the field over the preceding year. Pew’s findings focus specifically on journalism, but there are lessons aplenty for publishers and content builders of all stripes. And when it comes to digital and devices, this year’s edition does not fuss about:

“Nearly a quarter of U.S. adults, 23%, now get news on at least two devices—a desktop/laptop computer and smartphone, a computer and a tablet, a tablet and a smartphone, or on all three.

And those numbers are growing. They go on to summarize:

All of these findings, which hint that mobile is adding to and expanding rather than replacing news behavior, are reinforced by other data we have seen that track online behavior.”

Fancy that. Devices aren’t replacing the Web for content consumption, as some publishers have doggedly asserted, they’re adding to it. The Talking Points Memo headline announcing the report got it wrong. The future of news isn’t just “in your hand”. It’s in your hand, on your desktop, and materializing in myriad flickering transports we haven’t conceived of yet. And users are learning to snatch them all up at the same time.

Despite this, the study notes, “The top priority for many magazine executives in 2011 was building a tablet app.” That’s unfortunate. Throughout the report, Pew’s data reinforces the conclusion that focusing on a single device is heading down the wrong path. Tactics like isolating tablet customers with deliberately obtuse price tiers will cost you in the long run. The Great and Terrible Problem of the Web is not going away. The ever-fracturing multiplicity of devices is not going away. Print isn’t even going away (although it will be greatly reduced). For many publishers, a course correction is in order.

So Now What?

As I’ve been keen to assert, the future of media tends towards access. The ability to meet a user wherever they are with the content they want, on terms of their choosing. Techniques like Responsive Web Design have already helped developers evolve their mindsets. Related ideas, like Adaptive Content, can help writers, editors, and general managers do likewise. Content organizations should be experimenting with and adopting these techniques now. There are smart people working on this stuff. Go see their presentations. Read what they have to say. Hire them.

These approaches aren’t just ends in themselves, they’re transformative mental training wheels, teaching organizations to think content-out rather than canvas-in. And that’s the key to not only surviving, but thriving in a world where you have no idea what the next hot channel for your content will be. A world where a publisher puts out countless permutations of their content, small islands loosely connected—a content archipelago, not a field of closed silos.

This actually happened…

“It’s the Web. We can make it do anything.”

“Can you make it smell like strawberries?”

A pause.

“Sure.”

Another pause.

“You click a button and we’ll mail you some strawberries and you can rub them all over your screen.”

An exasperated stare.

“You didn’t say how.”

Possibilities are all in where you place the limitations.

Brad Frost recently noted the impending arrival of the iPad Retina display could “wreak havoc on the Web,” owing to mammoth image file sizes. Hopefully, with a little resourcefulness and education, the Web design and development community’s innate resilience will kick in and we’ll find some smart ways of dealing with this.

But there is one group that’s about to smack headlong into a reckoning, and that’s the publishers who’ve been using several popular device-specific app platforms to churn out print-like periodicals for the iPad.

The iOS apps created by systems from Adobe, Woodwing, Mag+, and others—the platforms used by the bulk of traditional publishers to crank out their iPad magazines right now—are essentially collections of PDFs or JPGs exported out of programs like InDesign and bound inside a wrapper application. Basically, they boil down to pictures of layouts, photos, and text. Rather than create new rendering engines from scratch, these platforms rely on existing desktop applications to do that work, then package up the output. While faster to develop, this has negative consequences for the end user. You can’t resize text. File sizes are untenably large.

Now apply the volumetric increase in pixels that’s upon us, and it’s easy to see why the size of an average iPad magazine issue is about to go through the roof. Very roughly speaking, a single page of text built this way and saved using light JPG compression weighs in at around 150-350kB. At the new Retina dimensions these same app platforms will generate pages on the order of 2MB. That’s per page.

This isn’t just a question of the bandwidth these apps will devour while downloading issues, it’s also a question of whether or not a user can actually store these things anywhere. The screen volume may have quadrupled, but the new iPad still ships with the same three memory options: 16, 32, and 64GB. As I noted on Twitter, the growth rate of the potential payload size just outgrew the growth rate of device storage exponentially. Some publishers may be implicitly backing themselves into maintaining cloud-based storage for their users, since there’s no way the average reader could keep more than just a few of these things on their device at one time. (Remember, there’s lots of other things vying for that space.)

The question now before platform makers is whether they will begin exploring alternatives or will pass the pain along to users in the form of unsustainably large issue sizes. The three likely options on the table for them are: 1) Do nothing; 2) Start building dynamic layout and text rendering engines; or 3) Begin basing their platforms on Web technologies.

Doing nothing simply won’t cut it, as either they or the user will begin encountering problems too obvious to ignore (though I strongly suspect we’ll see it being done anyway for at least a little while). Building your own layout engine and the runtime environment to display it can be an extremely complicated endeavor. Just ask a browser maker…

And that brings us to the third option. An existing markup and layout technology that’s widely deployed, supported, and understood. That’s the Web. This doesn’t mean they necessarily have to shift to entirely Web-based delivery, either. Many of the most successful iOS (and Android) apps are actually hybrid apps in disguise, utilizing modified WebKit views to display information. Adobe has clearly started laying some groundwork for this. Why reinvent the wheel?

Regarding The Oatmeal’s spot-on comic, “I tried to watch Game of Thrones and this is what happened”, and Andy Ihnatko’s well-circulated response, I could simply link to Marco and Jeremy’s posts with the succinct endorsement of, “Nailed it.” But as someone who’s spent a lot of time inside large media companies over the years, I feel compelled to throw my two cents into the mix.

These days the most common answer I get to, “Why’d you pirate that?” isn’t, “It was free,” but, “It was the only way I could get my hands on it.” Or, “It was a bazillion times easier.” As Jeremy noted, users are correctly identifying Byzantine content delivery mechanisms as damage and routing around them.

Here’s what content conglomerates need to realize: This is a good thing. Fantastic even. The audience is telling you, in no uncertain terms, they want your stuff. And they are telling you precisely what stuff. The people you’re calling “thieves” are telling you where you need to be. They are jumping through hoops only slightly less complicated than the ones you set out for them via official channels, displaying the sort of pent-up demand that should make you drool. This is what’s commonly referred to in business circles as an opportunity.

The odd thing is that when you talk to many media executives about this they frequently concede these points. On an individual basis this reality is sinking in, but at a corporate level it hasn’t resulted in substantive change. So here are a few modest proposals for the media folks to help move the ball down the field a bit:

No One Cares About Your Infrastructure

Stop bending new products and delivery mechanisms to fit your existing internal infrastructure. No one cares how hard that might make things for you. They just want it to work. Start projects by picturing what the user wants to have in their hands and build up from that. No ifs, ands, or buts. No subverting new products to fit legacy systems and business deals. Those are the exceptions that keep killing your user experiences and sending customers flying out the door. Be unafraid to start from scratch. The budgets for this pale in comparison to the revenue that’s draining from your balance sheets.

“Silos” Are Dead


The idea that you can segregate customers into “silos” based on devices and forms of access—and charge them multiple times at different rates—is demonstrably antiquated. In the old days these segments were few and well distant of one another. You could reasonably expect to charge Peter one price and Paul another and get away with it, or even request an additional payment from either for delivering it to them in an additional format. This was partially based on a Prisoner’s Dilemma scenario which has evaporated. The customer knows their options far better than you do now. The media companies that clue into the reality that the future is about frictionless access—the customer getting what they want, when they want it, on every compatible device they own and at a reasonable consolidated price—will be the ones that rule the future.

Stop Flogging Bogus Piracy Numbers


The piracy statistics that were on full parade during the SOPA and PIPA dustups were constructed on shaky math and specious logic. Many in the industry know this full well because they’ve been seeing the exact same numbers and models trotted around for the last few decades without alteration. Stop thumping the table with these stats. It sets up a needlessly adversarial view of your best potential customers and distracts from the fact that piracy is an economic blip compared to the opportunities you’re missing out on.

Bonus Round

For extra credit I would add, “Relegate advertising to supplemental, not primary, revenue.” It may not seem directly relevant to the issue of content delivery, but advertising revenue is such a disproportionately large share of revenue at many media companies that it’s often allowed to induce products for its own purposes, resulting in rights restrictions that simply make no sense to the end user. (i.e., The ad deal comes first, and the content is invented post facto as a carrier wave for it. A user-hostile farce ensues as rules are concocted to assure the advertiser that your eyeballs will be glued to it.)

So there was a certain appeal to the “switchy” style of adaptive design I was using on this site before: multiple fixed-width layouts stepped through via media queries as the viewport size changed. It was a salving balm for my OCD, a control-freak nature that in some part still falsely equated control with naively trying to dictate terms to the the user. It wasn’t the long-term approach for me, but I needed a stepping stone to transition myself into the Brave New (but actually quite old) World of a more responsive Web. Today it’s time for the training wheels to come off.

In addition to going fully fluid, I’ve made a raft of design tweaks here and there to open the space up a bit more and craft an environment more conducive to the style of writing I want to do. Some sections have been pulled down altogether while they get a rethink. My mindset for a more agile approach (little “A”, not big “A”) is to show fewer sections but with more polish and completion, rather than present more sections with only partial implementations (and I’m seldom ever down with “Coming Soon” placeholders).

Like many advocates of Responsive Web Design, I’m still thrashing through a satisfactory approach to handling images. But in the meantime I’m going ahead with what I’ve got since I’m not actually serving up anything larger (bandwidth-wise) than I was before. I hope to settle on an approach soon. In the meantime, the requisite post-launch cleanup and tinkering dance is well underway.

Throughout its brief history, the Internet has been regularly assailed by the flailing efforts of entrenched interests to uninvent it, whether through bad law or onerous contracts. Those who cannot compete litigate, those who cannot adapt lobby. And SOPA is clearly their handiwork. It’s time we put a stop to it.

If you agree SOPA is a bad idea—and if you’re a user of the Web, I sincerely hope you do—head to the bottom of Jeffrey’s article (under the “Act now!” section) for a list of actions you can take to help stop this very bad idea from becoming law.

Update

SOPA will be coming up for a vote in the House tomorrow, December 14, so if you oppose this legislation the time act is now. The team at Tumblr has put together a great site to connect you with your Representative and let your voice be heard.

The request came through I’ll-never-know-precisely-what company channels at BusinessWeek, where I was just digging into my first job in The Big City, a fresh staffer looking to make a mark. Apple was working on these “widget” things for their next OS. They were going to show them off at their annual developer conference. Could we please build one in a hurry? Oh, and Steve Jobs would probably be approving this personally, since it might be going into his keynote. So, you know, get busy. And make it great.

Skip ahead a bit…

Have you ever been backslapped? I mean like really pop-your-eyeballs-open, jolt-your-neck backslapped? That’s what happened to me as I stood next to my boss’s boss as she watched the video from Steve’s keynote. Jobs briefly demoed our widget and quickly moved onto one from a competitor. But as he started describing it he quickly added, “It doesn’t look as nice as BusinessWeek’s…” BACKSLAP!

And just like that, I started getting more meeting invites.

I know it might sound trivial, tangential contact at best. But in Steve’s uniquely irascible way, he helped give my career a little nudge by noticing the details in my work. And for that I’ll always be grateful.

I Saw What You Did There, Facebook: The Facebook chat promotion as it appears on the right-hand side of a user’s homepage. Personal tidbits obscured to protect the innocent.

Removing cues to close or abandon interaction flows is something that needs to be undertaken with great care and respect for the user’s initial intent. When used in complex, multi-part forms such as retail check-outs, removing site chrome and “links out” can help focus attention and aid in the completion of a task the user has explicitly voiced a desire to do.

But when used to sculpt the flow of traffic without the user’s say-so, you risk engendering confusion and suspicion. Hence, I typically advise clients against this sort of thing. Sure, you’ll get higher sign-up numbers, but at what cost? Many of the folks who wind up making it through the process will be doing so out of ignorance, and quite a few won’t be terribly happy about it once they arrive on the other side.

Every so often something rolls around that makes the field feel new, and for me, this is most definitely it. Moreover, I hope it marks the beginning of a renewed awareness—and embrace of—the inherent fluidity of the Web.

There’s been some great discussion on the topic of Responsive Web Design since Ethan first introduced us to it on A List Apart, and it’s been reminding me about our history. We arrived at the current, relatively rigid state of Web design out of a desire to impose order on a medium that began life as chaotic and wildly inarticulate (from a designer’s perspective). The Web was fluid by nature, but the tools were desperately primitive. The only way to keep the limitations and randomness from impeding your content was to lock down one side of the equation. We couldn’t control the browsers, so we bolted down the designs.

But the game has changed. Browsers have gotten, dare I say, pretty damn good. And a whole host of robust tools and devices have arrived that allow users to passively view, actively consume, or deliberately repurpose as they see fit. The fantasy we once coveted, of a perfectly reproducible canvas painted in pixels, has given way to a breathing reality mitigated by circumstance and conditions we will not be able to anticipate.

And this book points the way.

Many note the term “mobile” no longer fits the bill. While current trends started there with the first truly robust smartphones, it insinuates a usage (on the go) and a bandwidth (paltry at best) that often isn’t the case. A good look at the data my phone slurps down every month is all I need to know it’s a broadband life that little electronic sidekick of mine is living.

Up until the advent of workable tablets the term “small screen” almost cut it, but that too is out. It’s hard to argue that devices weighing in with screen resolutions starting in the neighborhood of 1024×768 pixels, mapped to physical sizes ideally suited to two-hand use, could ever really be thought of as “small.”

So what’s that leave us with? We need terminology clients can grasp intuitively, driven home by a sensible supporting statement or two, without leading the conversation down a pedantic rabbit hole. We need a suitable shorthand that broadly encapsulates the idiom. Lately, for me, that term has been “lightweight computing.”

I make no claims to lightweight computing being the perfect moniker. But as audience-friendly marketing shorthand goes, I think it fits the bill nicely. In addition to being something folks outside our industry can grasp without reams of explanation, it implicitly accounts for a style of interaction without making claims to context, data rate, or whether the device in question is the user’s primary computing experience (something that will become increasingly important down the road). The ever-changing device landscape may make this term obsolete in a matter of moments, but for now I know what I’m writing in my briefs.