The following clip from Mental Floss features Wired Editor Chris Anderson giving his take on where magazines and print might head in a tablet driven digital world. Be sure to click through to the post and listen to the quick audio clip - in it he mirrors something I wrote two years ago: http://mturro.com/2008/01/22/print-media-as-offline-lust-object/

This clip from Neil Perkin really underscores a point I was recently trying to make regarding the need for publishers to change more than just the output technology of their offerings. Simply taking your current publishing process and putting a “digital” face on it is a dead end. The entire system needs to be re-imagined not just the last mile.

I love everything about this video - aesthetically it hits for me on almost every count: music, process, letterpress, booze, promotion - it’s really perfect. Beyond all that I find a special satisfaction in that it celebrates a way of working that predates the digital - a time when a font was something you held in your hands. It’s important to look back - to live for a moment or two in what was and understand it’s timelessness. Only by doing this can we ever really hope to understand where we’re going.

The problem with this approach is that it’s highly unlikely that there will be one singular idea that does anything to help old growth media dig itself out of the swamp it’s mired in.

Outfits like Conde Nast need to stop looking for magic bullets and savior tablets and start doing the hard work it’s going to take to actually respond to the quickening pace of change.

Rather than running useless and wasteful lotteries to find AN idea the company should be cultivating an organizational ecology of collaboration and innovation that spawns thousands of ideas.

While most food and diet books focus on you - on how to make you look better, make you feel better, make you a more happy and loved person, make you look good on the beach, get you more dates - Michael Pollan focuses on us. It’s that simple little shift of focus (from me to we) that takes Pollan’s message out of the realm of self-help and into the world of subversive, political, anti-establishment activism. In exposing our food chain for the diseased, corrupt, polluting, corporate, calorie making assault on natural ecological process that it is Pollan has successfully tied our own personal health to the overall health of society. In tying the well being of the planet, our society, our economy, and our culture to the well being of people as individuals he has bridged the gap between self interest and saving the world. For the first time in a long time it would appear that well being and social activism share the same methodology.

The following clip from Josh Gordon’s Ad Sales Blog typifies the most troubling aspect of the digital tablet touchscreen slate fever that’s taken hold of the magazine industry: an obsession with output.

You see it everywhere - in blog posts, tweets, articles, videos, conferences, webcasts, segments on the nightly news - the tablet (whatever that might actually be) will save print publishing.

I certainly understand the attraction - these things are damn sexy and look damn fun to play with. I also see how a device similar to the prototypes embedded across the web could make it easier for traditional print design to transition to the digital world (and why that makes publishers as happy as a pig in shit).

Still, print publishers are kidding themselves if they think a device - even a device as sexy and mysterious as Apple’s unicorn slate tablet - comes at all close to addressing the real troubles that plague legacy publishing operations.

What these publishers are completely blind to is the real revolution that’s underway. It’s NOT a revolution of outputs. It’s NOT a revolution of digital over analog. It’s NOT a revolution of pixels over paper.

IT IS a revolution of decentralized, network oriented, peer to peer communication over hierarchical, command and control, one to many editorial voice.

IT IS an evolution of the reader into the user, the consumer into the producer.

IT IS the beginning of an era where people will be less interested in pre-defined, pre-packaged, pre-made media experiences - no matter how slick.

No friends, the real change happening has little to do with the output device. The true revolution in the magazine industry will be found (if there is in fact one to be found) in the ways publishing enterprises do what they do. Simply redirecting the current media funnel to a new flashy, slick, sexy, mysterious, popular device is not gonna cut it.

In a real revolution publishers would acknowledge that an issue’s life is just starting when it’s put to bed.

In a real revolution publishers would acknowledge that the most important work starts after the copy is finalized, the design signed off on, the files sent to production, and the cover is on the news stand.

In a real revolution revolution publishers would show some sign that they realize that the thing they make - their magazine - is a social object. If that social object is to survive in the digital wild it will need their care, their participation, their continuing attention and love.

In a real revolution publishers would stop concentrating on the things that help them keep their organization the way it always has been and start embracing the things that scare them.

In a real revolution publishers would be developing technologies that demonstrate that they understand how listening is now more important than speaking.

So to all the excited magazine publishers in the world I say this: enjoy the high while it lasts - get your skiff on, your tablet greased, your slate polished - this may be the last little bump you get before the terrible groaning reality of morning sets in and you have to start making real choices.

The following video of Time Inc’s tablet version of Sports Illustrated is pretty impressive. While a lot of webfully minded folks balk at any piece of technology whose marketing combines the words magazine, digital, and Adobe, it’s clear that this demo will get a lot of old school publishers all hot and bothered.

The main reason why publishers will love it is the same reason that open web advocates won’t - it conforms to the traditional media world view - it’s an issue based information product that plays nicely inside decades old workflows and production models. Old vernacular, methodologies, and paradigms can be grafted onto this new technology and work from day one. Whether or not that really is a good thing remains to be seen, but what is certain is that this looks fun to play with.

The real X-factor here will be whatever Apple does on the tablet front and how exclusive that product might be. A cheap, usable, slick tablet with an Apple on the back would be quite a bomb. And, if Alex Albrecht is to be believed (clip below), that may just be what we get. Personally I can see Apple releasing a dirt cheap piece of populist hardware - IF and ONLY IF that hardware is tied into an iTunes newsstand that sells digital subscriptions.

In the interest of trying out Amplify’s new video clipping feature I wanted to share out a video by a friend of mine - Shoes, by William Mallory. The music is by Mr. Mallory and the video is directed by he and Jessica Licciardello. For more videos by Will and Jess go to http://bluepeartelevision.com

This clip - from the transcribed version of danah boyd’s Web2.0 Conference talk “Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media” - is a spot on assessment of the change upending media. So often we get caught up in the idea that this change is about shifting output modes and substrates and never quite get that the real change is actually more social than technological. Ultimately any effort that simply grafts new technologies onto the same old social worldview - any effort that ignores the shift from broadcast to network, from bound to undbound, from pages to flow - will fail.

The following clip from an interview Samir Husni did with Bob Guccione Jr. betrays a what I see as a key blind spot in the the contemporary journalistic field of vision – a notion that story telling is somehow a non-technical act.

If I had to guess I’d say that this notion is fed by these journalists coming of age in a time when the dominant tools of their trade – the technology that drove their stories for centuries – was fundamentally invisible.  This invisibility mislead them into thinking that the art of story telling was somehow a ethereal act of creation – as mysterious and graceful as human existence – something that spewed forth from the muse – natural, organic, and clean.  This mistaken assumption makes me think of a recent essay by Douglas Rushkoff in which he writes:

Like those failed media renaissances before this one, we remain one step behind the capability actually being offered us. Only an elite—sometimes a new elite, but an elite nonetheless—gain the ability to fully exploit the new medium on offer. The rest learn to be satisfied with gaining the ability offered by the last new medium. The people hear while the rabbis read; the people read while those with access to the printing press write; we write, while our techno-elite program. As a result, a majority of people remain one dimensional leap of awareness and capability behind those who manage to monopolize access to the real power of any media age.

What’s happening in journalism today is that the journalists are being overrun by a wave of technology that is bringing the unwashed majority into what was once a formerly elite world. The ability to write – a level of technical competence that was at one time the ace tool in the journalist’s tool kit – is slowly becoming a widely distributed skill.

Still, elite story telling survives. Surfing that wave is the new breed – programmers building worlds with profound and powerful new tools. Without a doubt we are at the very beginning of the shift, but one thing is already crystal clear – if you’re concern is “seeking truth and telling the story” you will have to know how to code.