Firstly, tell us a little bit about Scrollkit – what does it do and how does it help people publishing on the web?

A simple way to think of us is that we are like InDesign for the web. We’re a visual editor that gives designers a massive amount of control over a single page. Because we allow you to edit pixels, not print fiber, you get to lay out pretty much any kind of media that you can think of. Video, photos, interactive effects, you can make pages that would satisfy Harry Potter.

You say that you’re on a mission to make the web more cinematic – what does a cinematic web look like?

We want more people to cry infront of their computer screens. Preferably from awe or joy. The web is the richest, most advanced publishing system we’ve ever had, but most stories posted on the web look like every other story posted on the web. We believe more people can tell stories online that are arresting and powerful, that they themselves are only capable of coming up with, but they need a tool that is more human.

So the answer to your question is, in some sense, I don’t know what it will look like and that’s exactly what makes it exciting.

Can web design achieve the same narrative, emotional or aesthetic results as a film, book or podcast? 

You can experience so many of our most mature mediums on an iPad or a laptop. You can read books, short stories, articles, watch films, tv, play classic arcarde games, and all of that is nice but they are all distinctly their own thing. The same is true on the web, what’s most exciting is not that you’ll be able to create a web page that achieves the emotional effect of a film or book, it’s that you’ll be able to come up with something that feels like it belongs in its own category. You mention, podcasts in your question but it’s funny because podcasts are they’re own thing and have only been able to be their own thing because of recent technology. They’re technically just audio files, so like radio in that respect but the way they’re distributed helped push them to be a unique format.

This is what attracted me to the nytimes “Snow Fall” story. It used videos, photos, text, but the piece didn’t feel like ‘multimedia,’ it felt like media, a single story told well. That’s what we need more of.

What’s wrong with the way we’re using the web visually at the moment?

Less is wrong about how we are visually consuming the web and a lot more is wrong with how we are making it. And the problem with how we are making it is that we aren’t making it in a visual way. The overwhelming majority of people fly blind when they make content on the web. They fill out two forms, a header and a footer, then preview it in wordpress when they’re finished. Imagine being a painter and not being able to see what happens as you wet your brush and slide it across your canvas. This is the kind of fundamental problem we have now.

I’m a huge fan of Bret Victor and his speech, Inventing on Principle ( http://vimeo.com/36579366 ). When creators see the changes they make as they make them, they make better stuff.

The web is very different from the traditional ‘broadcast’ media, but how does that change the way we tell stories with it? Presumably it goes beyond simply making things interactive and social?

Making things interactive and social is really awesome, if you can do that you are on your way. What’s not exciting is that, for most, that means putting a tweet button on their article.

The phrase ‘social media’ has always hurt my brain. All media is social by definition.

How does video fit into this? It’s described as the black hole on the web…is there a way to make videos more web-native?  

Video is the gorilla in the room. If you are compelling on video, you will rule pop culture. What is pop culture and what is web culture is getting more and more unclear. There are a zillion ways to make video more web native and people have been pushing that forward ever sense they had the bandwidth.

Finally, blue sky question: in your wildest dreams how do you see a perfect cinematic web looking ten years from now? What’s changed by then? 

To me, cinema is the art of making multimedia feel like media. You take a handful of technologies that don’t necessarily get along, then you find a way for them to complete each other. It’s always a messy process to get there and we’ve seen that recently. We are focused on the screen, we think we can significantly increase the quality of the content that people touch everyday.

Imagining technologies outside of the screen is the next frontier. I’ve been excited recently by MYO. You can control a computer by flexing the muscles in your arm.

My hope for the next 10 years is that they are as exciting as the past 10 years.

I wondered why I had not heard about it up until this point so I took out my computer to look for it. I found this:

…

In the print version of the article that Jon Stewart holds in his hands, it’s clear that this is a historic story for TIME. It’s the frontpage story, it’s full of extraordinary eye-catching visuals, and it’s introduced by the managing editor like this: “For the first time in our history, we are devoting the entire feature section of TIME to a single story by one writer.” The web treatment is 24k words dumped into a wordpress post. 

This is insane and it needs to stop. Getting people to say “Wow,” when they land on the page can mean the difference between a handful of facebook shares and a post that stops the internet for a day. It is an art to pull this off, every pixel counts, and if you are an editor charged with bringing Bitter Pill to the web your problem is that most of your job has been decided for you before you even begin. This is the part of the article your CMS allows you to edit:

The reason culture-denting stories are so often born in newspapers and magazines is because they are places where intense collaboration is common. Someone who is good at uncovering information works with someone who is good at visualizing it, who then works with someone who is great at inserting it into the world. The fact that is integral to this collaboration is that you own the page. When you know you can use every fiber of the page to tell a story you can create emphasis and go places that only you can imagine. If traditional publishers want to cultivate their authority on the web, they need to retake control of the pages they publish on.

When most people think about a redesign of big site like time.com, they start with the home page or a rethink of its central navigation. I think it’s more simple: start with the story page. Instead of trying to design a solid story template for all your content, give your editors the ability to break free of the template when necessary and shape the story themselves.

The Verge, Buzzfeed, and The New York Times are doing this and use a mixture of hand coding and in-house software to produce the articles they want to stand out. This kind of work is expensive and time consuming,  we’ve been working on a tool that makes it significantly easier for others to produce these kinds of stories then integrate them into the site they already have.

This afternoon I found a print copy of TIME Magazine, scanned many of its pages, and made a new version of Bitter Pill for the web on scroll kit. It took me a few hours and I imagine the editors at TIME could do a better job but I think that, if this version went live in place of the other one, it would have had a bigger response on the web.

You can take a look at it here.

If TIME had our WordPress plugin installed, they would be able to drop it into their site in one click.

If you’re interested in producing stories like this, send me an email. We are looking for an initial set of publishers to work with this spring.

hey@scrollkit.com

Shirky provides an extensive historical analysis to support his claim and while I agree with most of it, I think he ultimately misses the conclusion. Not only will the original mission of newspapers like the NYT sustain itself online, it will be revived in a way their founders could have never imagined. What’s lost in most discussions about the future of news is just what that original idea for a newspaper like the NYT really was and how the internet is in a unique position to execute it for the first time.

Idea

A hundred and thirteen years ago a ˜Business Announcement’ ran in the back of The New York Times. Adolph Ochs, then 36 years old, had just purchased the paper and on his first day he ran the following:

It will be my earnest aim that The New York Times give the news, all the news, in concise and attractive form, in language that is parliamentary in good society, and give it as early, if not earlier that it can be learned through any other reliable medium; to give the news impartiality, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect. or interests involved; to make the columns of The New York Times a forum for the consideration of all questions of public-importance, and to that end to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion.

It’s easy to forget that in 1896 this kind of talk was bewildering. At the time, population in NYC was surging, and the media market was dominated by papers like The World and The New York Journal which had become profitable by bashing their readers’ heads with lurid scandals. Among publishers, Ochs was a kind of joke. Instead of training his staff to hunt for apocalyptic headlines he turned his staff into a kind of impartial machine. At a time when the most profitable newspapers were running stories like, œWife Uses a Whip, or œA Fish that Plays the Piano, Ochs published reports on a local election so fair that the leaders of rival national committees wrote letters of thanks.

The work was utterly baffling to other newspapers because they failed to see how something so dull could capture anyones imagination or attention. The World and The New York Journal were in the business of producing vivid content; what they didn’t understand was that Ochs and the Times were in a different business entirely.

Ochs was selling a newspaper but what he was really selling was a belief that the pages of the Times reflected a kind of untampered public discourse. The ˜Business Announcement’ was more like a contract to prevent outside distortion. No organization could buy positive coverage from the Times and the paper itself would not add ˜pyrotechnics’ to its articles to sell more copies. Ochs was creating a major distinction; the ambition of the the Times was not to create news, but to be its definitive organizer.

How This Idea was Executed in 1896

It was a big and elegantly expressed promise but it was also one that was restrained by obvious technical limitations. Ochs had little more than a small office, a staff and a printing press. On a fundamental level his production method was no different than any content based news publication at the time. It was a reporting process and it looked like this:

Reporters enter a public, gather information, privately decides what parts of it are worthwhile, and then send that back out to the public as a representation of their dialogue.

All participation is controlled. If someone in that public wants to communicate to the public around them, they send a letter to the organization and if it fits their criteria, they send it back out.

In 1896 it was painfully easy to see how game-able the reporting process was. It put total power in the hands of a few and every stage of the process was vulnerable to chronic and untraceable distortion. This is perhaps why so many early newspaper publishers thought Ochs was naive and why some newspapers at the time were so open about their political leanings that they carried it in their title. Ochs knew this but he was also aware that there really was no getting out of it, these were technical limitations. He addressed the inherent problems of print through branding.

Trustee Media

The logic, in letter form, for trustee media goes something like this:

Dear Public,

We are here to represent you and your interests.

You’re not electing us, we are electing ourselves.

Signed,

-the newspaper

Ochs’s genius as a publisher was in creating an impression that the Times actually did stand for the public’s interests. Many newspapers at the time had vowed against ˜planted stories’ and political diatribes. The difference was the level to which Ochs showed his commitment. In his first year as publisher he turned down $33,600 in suspicious city advertising while nearly bankrupt, as he thought it squandered tax-payer money. He refused advertisements from over-promising tonics and degree programs and he published pages of reader letters. The writing was neutral, factual and without bylines. All of this added to the mystique of the Times brand.

Of course Ochs was aware that his contract was more an ideal than a reality and he chose his words carefully. This is why he never claimed to be impartial outright, it was always his ˜earnest aim.’ Even the slogan alluded to the Times’ epistemological bias. All The News That’s Fit to Print — meaning that there was other news out there, it just wasn’t important enough to merit circulation.

In many senses it worked. The Times came to be affectionately known as The Trust. A word that strikes at the faith required in their process, not its logic.

It took years but eventually The World and The New York Journal folded; The New York Times, and its ˜earnest aim’ to publish news impartially, set the model for the most profitable newspapers in the country. That is until now.

What Happened to this Idea in 2009

To frame what’s happened in journalism this past year as a matter of economics is to miss the entire point. Sure, a print publication will make less online than in print and will soon have to fire most of its staff in order to avoid bankruptcy but forget about money. Imagine for a moment that some wealthy benefactor donated a billion dollars and endowed the reporting staff of the NYT for the foreseeable future. In theory this would quiet many of the concerns of the Times and media critics who have spread fear of a weakening national press, but in actuality it would be a drop in the bucket. Even if the Times doubled its entire reporting staff, it would continue its picture perfect swan dive into the second-tier.

Somewhere in the past 113 years, somewhere in erecting Journalism Schools and awarding Pulitzer Prizes, the trustee method of executing Ochs’s idea became confused with the idea itself.

Trustee Media Vs. Direct Media

Perhaps the biggest challenge in media criticism this year has been making discussions on ˜Future of News’ more than a debate between New and Old Media. Just because a news organization established itself and started publishing recently doesn’t mean that the way they are publishing is any different than in the past. Many of the biggest news organizations to spring up in the last few years that are largely considered to be ˜new media’ — The Huffington Post, Gawker, Politico, Tech Crunch — are fundamentally similar to the NYT. That is to say, they are trustee media, they stake a claim on a certain beat and a handful of editors ultimately control everything that is published. When a story breaks and a number of their readers are trying to contribute it still looks like this:

To say that these organizations are without value would make me a hypocrite. For the past year and half I have published NYU Local, a trustee style news org where we, as 15 students, elect ourselves to represent a school of about 40,000. To some degree it has been successful, we’ve quickly lapped the school newspaper in hits and earned some awards, but anytime a big story on our site breaks and we sift through our email deciding what not to publish, it becomes clear that we are missing the point.

The aim of NYU Local was never to bring a collection of smart blogger/reporters together and have them pump out content; the aim was to capture the discussion of our university. Since our inception, our execution of this aim, like any other trustee news org, has been aspirational and abstract; the challenge the web poses to us is that it no longer needs to be that way.

It’s terrifying for any publication with a full-time staff of reporters, but it’s a lesson that is becoming impossible to ignore everyday on Twitter. The more people in your beat publish independently, the less your claim to that beat appears valid.

Much of the confusion and strife among established news companies in 2009 has come from a feeling that there is nothing they can do about this. The potency of the ˜The Reporter’ and the idea that a public needs this kind of representative has solidified so concretely most projects that don’t involve them have been seen as non-competitors. There have been hybrids, CNN’s iReport, HuffPo’s Off the Bus, and recently Gawker’s new way of sharing tips, but the editor, in each of these situations, still takes tight control. Despite ample warnings, an entirely better way of organizing a news company formed with their backs turned away.

Direct Media

In many ways it’s understandable. The staff at Twitter is so incomparable to the staff at the Times that it’s easy to see how they don’t see themselves as rivals, but there is a lot of evidence to suggest they are. The same goes for Wikipedia, Facebook, Google, YouTube, and any of the thousands of web applications that enable users to share and organize their own content. It’s insignificant on a small scale, easy to write off as amateurish, but once you put it in the context of a public as a whole, it matters. What normally would have been a rejected editorial in a large circulation newspaper travels through a public like this:

Multiply that by a million and you have the raw kind of public discourse that now happens every day on the internet. A single person can now speak to millions of people without touching a reporter. In many cases, it’s thrilling, but for the most part the tools are primitive; we are at the utter beginning of what this means for news production.