These days, you don't need to launch portal sites that vie for new audiences. You're better served leveraging existing applications to provide new functionality for venues that already attract a fair share of eyeballs or that even cultivate their own communities.
Internet activist Lawrence Lessig points out a feature of Apture, a rich media content compilation platform, that promotes government transparency by allowing bloggers and other publishers to embed links to rich media background info on politicians and their records (i.e., key moments of testimony in videos, historical source materials, government documents, and even bills and resolutions).
Apture announced Monday that it will partner with The Washington Post to promote this application, offering readers "a highly engaging way to view political data, congressional records, video, news and abstracts within a single Washingtonpost.com browser experience."
The Apture technology will integrate with Washingtonpost.com's congressional votes database to provide up-to-date information on the latest House and Senate votes. In addition, Washingtonpost.com will make this data and content available to any blog or Web site that uses the Apture publishing platform.
This partnership marks a larger trend: no longer concerned about "leakage" (visitors exiting a site following external links), news outlets are opening their portals to dynamically aggregated third-party content. Another prominent example is The New York Times and its recent beta-launch of Times Extra. The service aggregates news headlines from other publications (including blogs) and attaches them to relevant articles on The New York Times home page.
Denise Warren, chief advertising officer of the New York Times Media Group, said in a statement: "We are addressing a common desire for comprehensiveness, enabling people to find all the news and information they could want from all sorts of sources. Initiatives such as Times Extra and our other new products allow us to do an even better job of responding to our audiences' demands for interactivity, community, multimedia and news and information on an increasingly wide range of topics."
Both The Washington Post and The New York Times get the new "openness" of news media: they are gradually morphing into software companies, serving as curators of digital content from both inside and outside of their own newsrooms.
It's a few weeks old but still worth pointing out as another recent example of "Disruptive Realism" - a clever twist on the slogan of the New York Times: 'All the news we hope to print:'
Good News! from Blake Whitman on Vimeo.
From the press release (linked to the Prankster group The Yes Men):
"Early this morning, commuters nationwide were delighted to find out that while they were sleeping, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had come to an end. If, that is, they happened to read a "special edition" of today's New York Times. In an elaborate operation six months in the planning, 1.2 million papers were printed at six different presses and driven to prearranged pickup locations, where thousands of volunteers stood ready to pass them out on the street. Articles in the paper announce dozens of new initiatives including the establishment of national health care, the abolition of corporate lobbying, a maximum wage for C.E.O.s, and, of course, the end of the war. The paper, an exact replica of The New York Times, includes International, National, New York, and Business sections, as well as editorials, corrections, and a number of advertisements, including a recall notice for all cars that run on gasoline."
[via the Gothamist]
Associate Creative Director Dave Hoffer has coined a new term: Disruptive Realism. After discussing some examples in this video, he was inspired to elaborate:
"I've had a number of conversations about this since the video was posted and I realize that the video doesn't give a really conclusive definition.
Disruptive Realism is an expression presented in an everyday context that disrupts peoples perceptions about different things. Expression can mean many things and it a way it's art but it's also much more expansive a term than just art.
Banksy's graffiti looks real enough that you might do a double take looking at it. It draws you into the content which is disruptive...like a little girl flying a refrigerator kite in New Orleans.
The other two examples are even more non-conventional than the word Art implies. Most people hear the word art and they think of a painting in a museum. Because Bruno Taylor's work is an experience that involves physical designs like the swing set in the bus stop, the viewer is no longer viewing, they're interacting and the videos he takes of people enjoying the installations are, in fact, part of the art. So this example is difficult to define, but definitely real and definitely disruptive.
Improv Everywhere is one part performance art and one part massive, crowdsourced goof. People get together (often strangers) to collaborate on a kind of a joke on the unsuspecting and unknowing non-participants. In a way, it's almost an anti-terrorism...Humorism? But again, very real and very disruptive.
In the case of the fake NY Times, I would say that absolutely, it's Disruptive Realism and if the issue's headline was that the wars are over, then it's a hopeful message, which is a very good thing.
Another example a friend pointed out to me was Reverse Graffiti, where Paul "Moose" Curtis (awesome middle name by the way) "makes pictures by cleaning." He goes on to say that reverse graffiti is also commentary in that he can't "not tow the environmental line" so his art is disruptive in that he says that people walk up to it and realize that his work is dirt removal and that the world is "really, really dirty." If that ain't reality and if that ain't disruptive then I don't know what is. Hopefully viewers are moved to clean more and ride their bike to work because the art is a very visceral represesentation of how nasty pollution is.
Yet another example was Orson Welles's 'War of the Worlds' radio broadcast, which was meant as entertainment and likely a commentary on how evolution had been twisted into Social Darwinism (which is an interpretation of the HG Wells book on which the broadcast was based.) Regardless of its intention, the broadcast caused mass hysteria. An excellent example of Disruptive Realism."
In the past two weeks, there’s been at least a dozen stories in the mainstream and not-so-mainstream media about the importance of innovation in a recession. For businesses, refocusing on R&D and innovation really is a good strategy in down times. There’s plenty of historic evidence to back the claim up (the invention of farming technologies and civil engineering breakthroughs in the Great Depression, alternative energy investments in the early 1970s, and a sharpening of Internet business models after the dot com bust in the late 90s).
What’s also true is that writing about innovating in hard times is also good business. Writers and editors at newspapers, magazines, blogs and the rest have to produce relevant content to make their engines run and nothing is more relevant right now than the economy.
In that sense, any crisis – economic or otherwise – brings opportunity for media business (so much so that the media has been accused at times of creating or at least enhancing mundane things to crisis-like levels – see the recent media flap over John Edwards’ adultery and/or indiscretion).
Reporters, bloggers, producers, editors, and marketers are information dealers. In times of peace and stability, we have to work harder to come up with compelling stories. In times of crisis, news reporting and news translating becomes more focused (and the number-one standard for any writing worth a damn is focus – just ask your high-school English teacher).
So is the media by its very nature self innovating? Or is it just reactionary?
The headlines in the New York Times on September 10, 2001 were as follows: "Jailers Who Thrive on Silence," "Police Searches, Judicial Review and O’Connor’s Death Penalty Comments," and "Finally, Big Women on Campus." 9/11 brought news that riveted the country for the next nine months. Then came the “Post-9/11” media trend stories. Dozens of articles and books on Post 9/11 Travel, Business, Parenting, and Music were published. Dieting fads were even linked to the terrorist attacks (critics of Atkins’ fairly radical low carb diet attributed its success to “cultural anxiety” caused by 9/11).
It could be argued that reporting on the news is a reaction to the events of the day, and that creating trend stories out of the news is innovative story telling. A closer look shows that the really innovative books and articles (translation: the most successful) are those that take a long look at sub-sets of the trends or even at broad trends – they take the news in stride and apply it as a symptom of deeper attitudes. Freakonomics, for example, was a huge bestseller because it took a look at loopholes in typical economic behavior and made atypical connections. This could not have been done by simply reacting to economic news, and indeed author Steven Levitt had been studying and writing about economics for at least 12 years before he wrote the book with Stephen Dubnar in 2003.
The lesson here is the same as it is in business innovation: it takes time to produce real, lasting, award-winning success.
To that end, I would say that the vast majority of news and media does not rely on innovative thinking to succeed. Mostly it relies on news, and especially crisis-level news. At the same time, news provides the seeds of innovative story telling, which means the newsmen and women, the reporters and bloggers, the marketers and book makers need the time, latitude, and support to really write.
(By Sam Martin, frog design)
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