Fascinating discussions going on at the moment about the iPad and its implications for the distribution of media content.

Apologies for the tenuous election link – but it is ironic that the media is thinking about a distribution-sharing deal with Apple and is finding that like David Cameron and Gordon Brown whoever Labour get as their boss, things aren’t always that simple.

So is this device the saviour of the media or a chance for Apple to take over the fanboy/girl/tech consumer world?

On one hand, we have the legendary Jakob Nielsen telling us about the implications of the interface and what that means for anyone designing content and on the other there’s a running conversation about self-censorship by the media in order to get your content in the Apple Store.

Bruce Tognazzini, of the Nielsen Norman Group, believes Apple’s stance is similar to printers telling the media what can go on their product

At this point, tens of millions of people are living under significant press restrictions engineered by Apple and Steven P. Jobs.

Uniquely, Apple, in this case, is not even the press. It is the paper company. If the press wants to print its material on Apple’s fine, white vellum, it will do it Apple’s way. And the press, as Dan Gillmor has elsewhere pointed out, is stampeding to do just that, handing over traditional freedoms it normally guards so zealously in the process.

Apple’s rules for its App store, changed back in February after complaints about content. But interestingly the implications of this are that it might not just be those wanting to sell us skin apps, or sex games, that get hit.

There’s an interesting post on Shiny Shiny about the implications Apple’s no-nipples policy means fashion mags are censoring their iPad editions

It’s even more ironic because the iPad has been billed as the saviour of the magazine industry and also given Apple’s reputation as a mainstay of the creative industries.

Side note: have a look at the list of “rude” apps that haven’t been banned – including Playboy

And there was an interesting list of “conditions for acceptance” published on the Techcrunch about the rules introduced in February

1. No images of women in bikinis (Ice skating tights are not OK either)

2. No images of men in bikinis! (I didn’t ask about Ice Skating tights for men)

3. No skin (he seriously said this) (I asked if a Burqa was OK, and the Apple guy got angry)

4. No silhouettes that indicate that Wobble can be used for wobbling boobs (yes – I am serious, we have to remove the silhouette in this pic)

5. No sexual connotations or innuendo: boobs, babes, booty, sex – all banned

6. Nothing that can be sexually arousing!! (I doubt many people could get aroused with the pic above but those puritanical guys at Apple must get off on pretty mundane things to find Wobble “overtly sexual!)

7. No apps will be approved that in any way imply sexual content (not sure how Playboy is still in the store, but …)

So, still some way to go before we know if this coalition will really be as big as some people believe it will be.

BTW, anyone know if Hollywood has to do the “no nips and bits” thing with its movies that are distributed via iTunes?

Rather than a rucksack full of tools, the Caped Crusader was able to easily change items in and out of his belt pouches to solve the issue at hand.

The constant debates about the skills required to operate in a mediasphere that has rapidly change and will continue to do so for some time to come (unless the departures of Simon Waldman and Will Lewis should have all of us involved in paid journalism worried) have brought me back to this idea.

A while ago some 79 people kindly helped answer a mini survey around this core idea of what skills journalists need. I posted up quick graphs of the responses in a Flickr set, but haven’t had a chance to get to grips with the full responses… yet. (If you fancy getting in on the act, I’ve not closed the survey.)

But one question I asked was: how important do you feel programming and development are?

Colombia set to manufacture robo-journalists

Not really – in case you hadn’t heard, Colombia have created a joint masters programme allowing journalists to develop computer science
skills. It will be interesting to see what they get out of this five-semester course which has some pretty interesting potential.

But how much of these kinds of skills are enough, or too much? Or should it be about enough coding to understand?

My own view is based around experiences gleaned during my master’s degree in elearning technologies with the computing department at Portsmouth University.

During the course we had to learn: some JavaScript, HTML (I tried to be a smart arse and went for XHTML to make my life a bit easier), CSS, Flash, learn about the issues behind interface design and usability, issues with accessibility, educational theory, syllabus design, content design/delivery options, psychology and project management.

I worked out quite quickly that developing takes me a very long time – although I do enjoy it. (Disclaimer: I sat down in 1981 with a BBC Model B, a portable TV for a monitor and what turned out to be a very buggy book on games programming in Basic – and gave up after typing up some 2,000 lines of code that didn’t run, because I didn’t know anyone in my hometown who could help).

I quickly swapped the focus of my studies from building things (which was fun, interesting and useful) to using open source tools and plug-and-play sites powerd by dataportability – and how these can foster learning communities and networks of practice.

On a day-to-day basis though, it is more the understanding of the basic principles that I’ve found useful. And I wonder, given the tight deadlines in MSM newsrooms, whether this is more realistic?

Recently I’ve got a bit of pup combined with the HTML and CSS, which help me unpick some Wordpress theme issues.

I’ve started learning some MYSQL, Ruby (a twitter chat with Joanna Geary and James Ball about learning Ruby were something that got me going there), a play with Django (inspired by Adrian Holovaty and Aron Pilhofer) and I’ve downloaded the iPhone development SDK and been having a look at the ITunesU course from Stanford.

I may never be good at any of these, but I’m certainly interested to see how they work.

But Tony Hirst, browser-bashing guru from the Open University (amongst many other things), believes that learning to write for frameworks is not always a good thing – as there are already tools and ways of working that will allow journalists to put ideas together using existing tools.  Have a look at his post on Programming not coding…

He’s done some really interesting work in this area – using googledocs spreadsheets for housing/mashing data, linking rss feeds into Yahoopipes and Many eyes wikified to name just a few – here’s a link to the audio and presenttaion he did at the first news:rewired event.

And it is an interesting thought – does everyone need to know everything?

The simple answer is no – but what do we learn?

There’s a really good post from Aron Pilhofer on different frameworks, and how who you talk to will influence what response you get (sounds obvious but read Aron’s post and you’ll see what I mean and why it is still in line with my utility belt metaphor).

Things journalists can should learn from developers

One of the key things I took from my course was some underpinning ideas of developing objects, content, sites etc. I’ve been reading up around Agile development and the Lean business framework as a result. And not being afraid to try things, and get them wrong – now that is an expensive luxury in journalism, but in the right context it is vital (Health warning: obviously not in a story which contains the risk of defamation!!).

And in one of the slew of interesting posts coming in through my twitter feed I found that Martin Belam, information architect over at the Guardian, has been talking about this very issue regarding how journalists think and what they can get from understanding some ideas behind programming.

And he makes this very interesting point about the attitude towards sharing space/knowledge:

“Contrast that with the statement issued on behalf of some sports journalists in Scotland galled at having to sit near ‘bloggers’. Instead, tell a web developer that a bunch of journalists are interested in learning code, and it seems that the most likely reaction is “Yay! How can I help?”.”

The guerrilla approach

I’m guessing that refers to Rubyinthepub – a kind of self-help group (although given my masters I’d rather say learning network or network of practice) that came out of a conversation between Joanna Geary and James Ball on Twitter.

It’s a very simple idea – journalist goes to a pub with a laptop, some beer and a friendly developer. Lo and behold, instant informal learning sessions.

And it’s this kind of approach to journalism (and learning [read continuous professional development if you are an educator]) that I find so encouraging.

So where from here?

We’ll have to wait and see – and to an extent I think it depends on how you perceive journalism (in both its paid and unpaid forms) and what the journalist perceives their role to be.

Colombia’s course sounds pretty interesting, but on a smaller scale most of us who teach journalism are looking at some of the interesting and innovative solutions around at the mo.

But just in case you think development knowledge is not for you, have a think about these examples:

• Interested in data/computer-assisted reporting?  Maybe a bit of SPSS and Ruby would taste good with your Access or Excel. Or go the googledocs mash-up route for some very tasty visualisation fun.
• Part of a hyperlocal team? How about hacking a Wordpress install or even using Everyblock code (DJANGO) to create your own scraper site?
• Understand usability and accessibility? Then just maybe you can think about how your content is delivered and consumed and adjust your design and writing accordingly (and proper ALT tags help massively here).
• Got a basic idea of how (if) the iPad works? Then you can start looking at the business models arguments and see where that takes you.

But there is a simple underpinning concept for me – what is the best tool for the job?

Shark repellent or batarang - your choice?

After all, you may be able to use a batarang to chin a shark – or you could just scare it off with your shark repellent bat spray.

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• An Alternative Future for Journalists (onemanandhisblog.com)
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• Hack to Hacker: Rise of the Journalist-Programmer [The Future] (gawker.com)
• Coders meet journalists; journalists meet coders (blogs.journalism.co.uk)
• How much computer science does a journalist really need? (blogs.journalism.co.uk)

Sit back and gawp as the camerman zooms in before yer man realises what is happening. (The zoom in is from the Youtube vid as other versions don’t do it)

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• Live TV catches Australian banker looking at semi-nude photos (news.bbc.co.uk)
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Just in case you missed it this week, or on all he other sites.

In total 75 kind people volunteered their time and effort to answer the questions. I’m going to get to grips with it and add my two pence/cents worth on it over the next few days.

But rather than just sit on it until marking hell becomes a little easier, I’ve screen grabbed the graphs returned by the googledocs form and share them here as a slideshow (in no particular order).

(Just in case you have an issue with Flash widgets, here is the Flickr set of the images)

Tony Hirst (@psychemedia) on data mashing by egrommet

And here’s the presentation.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Learn to love the data (egrommet.net)
• OUseful: Gripes with Guardian’s DataStore #datajourn (blogs.journalism.co.uk)

I managed to record the session on Troubleshooting in Online Journalism with Adam Tinworth, Jon Bernstein, Robin Goad and Malcolm Coles.

News:rewired on troubleshooting online journalism by egrommet

The audio should be downloadable, so if you want to download and hack it about please do – just tell me where you’ve put it and link back to the page pls.

Adam has posted his slideshow from the session, and I’ve embedded it here so you can try and sync the two manually. (I’ll post the start time in due course, as this should be the full session. The audio is a little noisy, but I’ve not had a chance to properly clean it yet.)

This was a pretty interesting session and well worth a listen if you were unable to make it or in a different session.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Five Things I know about journalism (news:rewired) (slideshare.net)
• Top five UK journalism blogs and Tweeters in 2009 (and who to watch in 2010) (blogs.journalism.co.uk)

There have been a lot of great posts talking about what skills should be taught, what developments there are at j-schools and trying to prepare people for a future very different from the one I trained for.

Patrick Smith posted on Online journalism education in the UK: the trouble with adapting to an online age. Other people that got me thinking along these lines recently were Steve Buttry with his post on curriculum advice for journalism schools and The Changing Newsroom’s My “Dare to Dream” Journalism Curriculum.

We are in the situation where everyone has different spins on the skill set. The core is there and recognisable but everyone has their own favourites – and then there is the whole issue of what platforms.

So, as an interested party I’d like to ask you this – what do you think journalists should know? What skills do you think they need? Can you help by filling out a short(ish) survey?

This is just an initial survey to get some ideas together. There are about 23 questions mostly on a sliding scale of how important you think they are (but you do get a chance to add your opinion too) – if you can help it would be greatly appreciated.

More on this as the thinking develops (or the good links get auto-posted from my del.icio.us account).

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UPDATED: 29/11/09

After a fair amount of messing and then reinstalling the plug-in – the embed seems to work, but only in Firefox.

Can anyone else see it? Let me know?