The Producer

Sao Paulo (Photo by andredeak via Flickr)

As I was leafing through the FT, I came upon an amazing photo of two soaring towers in Shanghai. In the foreground was a construction site. The photo was sexy enough to lure me into reading the paper’s mining-industry analysis.

Mining! What was I thinking? Well, it was all worth it for this one little nugget – buried under reams of text about copper prices and the stockpiling of zinc by China:

Rio Tinto, the multinational miner, reminded investors of these fundamentals … . The urbanisation rate of the Chinese population is still only 45 percent, and that is not even mentioning India or Brazil — “50,000 new skyscrapers are needed by 2025″, it adds.

Really? Fifty thousand skyscrapers in the next 15+ years? That’s about 3,300 per year, or 63 a week or nine a day for 15 years!

OK. So I have no idea how Rio Tinto built its projection. For instance, how do they define what qualifies as a “skyscraper.” And I also don’t know how many skyscrapers have been built, on average, each year over the last 15 or 20 years. Maybe Rio’s number is not so amazing.

On the face of it, though, it’s kind of mind boggling.

I recently read a piece in the Financial Times that seemed to be another sign that the future will not be one where being well read is a common trait.

The front-page story told how many in the City of London has been enthralled by a 15-year-old intern’s observations about media consumption amongst his friends. From the FT article:

Mr Robson had little comfort for struggling print publishers, saying no teenager he knew regularly reads a newspaper since most “cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text” rather than see summaries online or on television.

It just so happens that I was having a conversation with a professor of philosophy(!) over the weekend who said much the same thing. She said it was difficult to get her students to read. She was talking about college students. Isn’t that what most of their education consists of, reading and discussing complex texts?

It seems like we’ve been hearing for years about how fewer and fewer people are reading books and newspapers. The learned have complained that information is being chopped into smaller and smaller bits, to the point where coherent arguments can no longer be made in the time allotted by society.

But the ability to think for yourself and puzzle through problems big and small comes — in large part — from reading and understanding the structure of ideas and relationships. As a colleague said to me, the mind is like any other muscle. You must exercise your mental faculties to build them up and use them.

Are we on the road to a time when a small class of thinkers who have an unnatural predilection for things like reading will rule over a class of people who are happy to consume without thinking?

Well, that’s a drastic conclusion to draw. Still, I’m concerned that people seem to be seeing less value in reading substantial works and reports. It surprises me since I find such pleasure in those pursuits, while also living much of my life in the digital domain.

Could we use a new source of news? I’m thinking we could.

I’m calling it “Maximum Planet,” a riff on the title of Suketu Mehta’s book “Maximum City.”

It’s my belief that the future is being written right now in places like Brazil, Nigeria, India, Malaysia and China. But we’re still looking at these places as outliers, suppliers and backwaters. We don’t see them for what they are.

They are the new leaders. They see the world from a different perspective. And they’re combining the tools of the information age and global commerce with a massive advantage in human capital to chart their own course into the future.

This isn’t a new idea. It has been widely observed that the last century was the “American Century” and that this century will be the “Pacific Century.” But this shift — assuming it is actually happening — has not been fully reflected in the media. And, anyway, I’d argue that this will be much more than the “Pacific” century. There are interesting ideas and developments on every continent.

(I do want to note that NPR — where I work — is an exception to this observation. The company has long displayed a commitment to chronicling the lives of people around the world. It is one of many stand-out features of America’s premier broadcast news organization.)

I think it’s finally time for a news organization with a holistic view of the world and an innovative approach to content creation and distribution.

I’m imagining something like The Economist for the new media age, with the addition of cultural coverage akin to that found in the NYT and the human tone of NPR.

Some people are moving in this direction, from biggies such as the NYT and NPR to upstarts such as GlobalPost and GroundReport. But they aren’t quite at the place I’m imagining, yet.

I forgot to say what I specifically like about the New York Times article skimmer. There are really two things that stand out to me:

1. It provides roughly equal weight to all of the content choices available under each subject heading. That allows me to focus on searching the content instead of trying to decipher the site’s visual and editorial hierarchy.

2. It loads everything into a single frame or viewer. When I select a new subject it just reloads the same frame with a fresh batch of results. I don’t have to scroll. I don’t have to try and understand a new environment. I’m in the same environment, it’s just the information available to me that has changed.

One of the missing pieces to the puzzle is that when I do click on a story in the skimmer it takes me to a standard story page. I hope that they’ll further develop the skimmer product so that it loads the story into the skimmer window in a layout that is specific to that environment.

It’s been my contention for some time now that most (all?) news sites have been blind to the fact that their determination to recreate “pages” on the Web is a mistake. I can navigate any major news site OK. But it never seems like it’s quite right. In fact, it is often a frustrating experience. So I was relieved and excited to see the NYT’s “article skimmer” the other day. It is a small, but significant, step in the right direction. It is the future of news. Here’s what it looks like:

You’re not overwhelmed, are you? OK, I oversold it. In fact, they don’t make a big deal about it. This simple prototype is not the future of news. But it points us in the right direction.

The Web is but a conduit for information. It is interactive. It is visual. It is not a printed page. It is a view upon the knowledge of all mankind, or it hopes to be. And that is how we need to think of it, as a view, a porthole, a frame through which to look at all that our fellow travelers on this earth want to share with us. The Web is not a moment in time. It is an ever evolving imprint of who we all are at once.

OK. Enough BS. My point is that people come to the Web looking for information. They’re only looking for depth and embellishment when they find the topic/information they’re looking for.

So the entry point for a specific producer’s “Web site” should demonstrate that the producer understands the consumer’s need for information. A site, or entry point, should understand that the seeker is looking for information. The information architecture and interface design should be focused on making it easy for the user to find what they are seeking.

The article skimmer prototype on the NYT seems to understand that. If only everyone did. Oh well. It’s a start. This is just another thought in a series of thoughts I’ve had on this subject.