flipboard's mike mccue web format has contaminated' online journalism technology los angeles times

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Flipboard's Mike McCue: Web format has'contaminated' online journalismDecember 16, 2010 | 1:51pm

Flipboard, the social magazine app for the iPad, seems to be having a flipping good run.

Last week, the famously design-conscious Apple Inc. named Flipboard its App of the Year. Then

Wednesday, Chief Exec utive Mike McCuejoined T witter's board of directors. On Thursday,

Flipboard released its f irst major update, allowing users to ''magazine-ify" a broader range of online

content.

Flipboard can now make pleasant-looking, magazine-like pages from almost any site, including

Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and thousands of blogs and news outlets. The app is becoming a new kind ofreading-friendly, distraction-hostile browser, with the goal -- as McCue said in an interview Monday -

- of "making the Web beautiful again."

It's generally agreed that the Web isn't a very good place to read. With constantly changing,

amorphous formatting and an invariably ad-choked feel, the Web has never been able to replicate the

quiet, unencumbered pleasure of reading in print. The trick, McCue says in the following excerpts, is

to marry the best of print's aesthetic and the best of the Web's speed, reach, and mobility.

How can journalism benefit from the tablet? What can it do that the newspaper or the

PC can't?

McCue: The problem with journalism on the Web today is that it's being contaminated by the Web

form factor. What I mean is, journalists are being pushed to do things like slide shows -- stuff meant

to attract page views. Articles themselves are condensed to narrow columns of text across 5 , 6, 7

pages, and ads that are really distracting for the reader, so it's not a pleasant experience to 'curl up'with a good website.

Journalism is being pushed into a space where I don't think it should ever go, where it's trying to

support the monetization model of the Web by driving page views. So what you have is a drop-off of

long-form journalism, because long-form pieces are harder to monetize. And it's also hard to present

that longer stuff to the reader because no one wants to wait four seconds for ev ery page to load.

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About the Reporters

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W.J. HenniganTiffany HsuNathan Olivarez-GilesDavid Sarno

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How can the tablet improve on that?

McCue: What the tablet does, for the first time, is let us hit the reset button on the presentation of

content to readers.

So now you're getting these newspaper- and magazine-reading apps that do a much better job of

showing the content on a full screen, and with nicer, larger advertisements.

The only problem with that is, if you just move your print world to the digital world -- like take Wired

magazine and drop it into the tablet -- you lose all the advantages with the Web. There are a lot of

problems with the Web, but there are a lot of great things about it, too.

Like what?

McCue: The fact that I can just share any article from anywhere, with anyone -- and have it injected

into a social conversation about that.

Let's leverage the power of the Web -- don't get rid of it, but make the Web beautiful again. We need

to give the content room to breathe, and give magazine-style advertisements the opportunity to

flourish. We want to allow people to share all this content across many social networks and drive

people to retweet and share even more.

There's also a lot of opportunity to do more interactive news -- that you can touch. To look at maps,

and turn models of nuclear power plants in North Korea in three dimensions, stuff like that.

There's been a speed bump in terms of that stuff with Flash, because Flash isn't supported on these

[Apple] platforms. But HTML5 solves a lot of those problems -- you can do 3D graphics and touch-

sensitivity with HTML5 -- all on a Web page.

You've hit on a nice way to repackage existing blog posts and stories in a magazine-

like format. Big publishers will probably want to be adopting a lot of your design ideas

for their own content. When they do will you still have an advantage?

McCue: The magic of this is that we're combining all these different feeds from all these different

places with one simple user interface. From a technical perspective, you can look at us like a new kind

of browser -- a feed browser, if y ou will.

That's very much needed because if you look at the way magazine apps work, y ou have to go to the

app store and download an application just to read something -- and that just doesn't scale. T hey all

work differently, and nobody's going to go in and for every single publication they read, connect to

Facebook and Twitter.

The other thing is, there are the large publishers that have the ability to have their own app and their

own presence in the mind of the consumer. But then there's a whole laundry list of these incredible

blogs -- and they don't want to create an app. It's so expensive to build one of those things -- why

should they have to do all that themselves when they can just present their content in RSS or on

Twitter?

That said, on the Web, we are trying to create some news standards and raise the bar on HTML

content. It would be great if more Web pages worked this way in the first place. And it'd be great if we

could have an influence on that.

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-- David Sarno

hoto: Mike McCue, right, and part of Flipboard's team, pictured in June, 2010. Credit: Robert

Scoble /Flickr

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"... journalists are being pushed to do things like slide shows"

For the most part only undesirable and sensationalist sources do slideshows all the time. Serious

publishers have stuck to principles and continue to deliver what their audience likes. Ultimately the

web must reign because it's open, though admittedly Flipboard has brought a good transitional tool

and concept as things move forward in the publishing business.

Posted by: Julio Franco | December 16, 2010 at 11:30 PM

As a pioneer of the original IE 3.0 for Microsoft and seeing 4.0 starting to display many more ads(and hard drives filling up with those ads back then), I was originally anti-initernet for that reason

alone. I then thought (back in 1996) it would be great to have just a 'text browser'... albiet this is doing

what DVR is to TV, squelching advertising, content is what viewers are looking for and providing that

to them in the best possible way is still what I preserve even in my own AD Free business.

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