The web at its core is not a system for publishing articles and rendering them in a browser. Rather it is a system for making connections — between documents, devices and ultimately people.

via Evan Hansen, How the Web Wins | Epicenter | Wired.com.

This wave has two faces. One is the trend towards more minimal, readable designs. The other is the imperative to make content as easily reformattable as possible, separating content from the designs in which it’s initially clothed.

You can see it at work in tools like Instapaper and Readability. You can see it in applications like Flipboard, which filter and reformat news through the lens of your social network. (more…)

But right now there is only one electronic device that can genuinely be said to support a news organisation. It has two large screens, its own keyboard layout and it takes a fortnight to learn to use properly. It’s called a Bloomberg terminal.

via Can apps save news journalism? | Adrian Monck | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

There might be a grain of truth when we say that this is “an experimental year” for publishing on the iPad, yes. But that doesn’t mean we also need to repeat the same mistakes that we made when Flash promised that we could make Web sites flip pages like print magazines, or when the Web was still so new that the only model we had to understand it with was print publishing, or when CD-ROMs tried their best to recreate magazines in ‘multimedia’ form. Those lessons have been learned already.

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Sometimes readers will want to engage with a particular story in the calm, uncluttered space an iPad affords, with no distractions and with the content front and center. Other times, they may want to read things — as we increasingly do — in the midst of a busy hub of data. That should be the reader’s choice, not the publisher’s. (more…)

“I was observing what was going on with mobile devices, and I realized I could read an entire book on my iPhone,” Edmiston said. “The more I thought about it, I really felt like there was something transformative going on here. And at the same time, there’s a huge pool of talented people who can create high quality content that people will pay for.”

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It’s no secret that Time Inc., like every other magazine publisher, would very much like to work with Google. Both because they think the new Android tablets will be a hit, and because publishers want leverage when they talk to Steve Jobs.

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TV is simply one more kind of digital content that needs a strategy. […] In this nebulous, fledgling relationship between TV and the Internet, Jimmy Fallon and Ashton Kutcher are standing out as leaders.

Lessons from NBC’s Late Night:

• Timeslot doesn’t matter anymore.
• Programming must truly be cross-platform.

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