Hi. Here are the notes for my talk from this morning.
I hope you enjoyed it. Feel free to send me email at giles@gilest.org
if you have any comments.

Stuff in quotes is stuff that I would have done an "I'm Feeling Lucky" on, 
if I'd remembered to.

GT




Hello. Intro. I'm feeling lucky technique.

LUCKY:	"giles turnbull"

Don't know much about Mobile, so I'll talk about Journalism.

Before I talk about future, I want to tell you some stories from the past.

LUCKY: "Cambridge evening news"

Started at CEN - junior reporter - very grumpy news editor in charge, Peter Wells
- describe him and how he ruled the newsroom; sent me back to cover man in car,
changed my first splash about archaeology.

Quiet town but some excitement - Jupiter collision with Shoemaker-Levy - man held
at gunpoint by stupid robbers - first mobile reporting experience was Tandys with
rubber cup modems.

Anyway, lucky move to...

LUCKY:	"PA"

London. PA. Explain PA. I was Fleet St first internet corr, but no-one cared.

Timing: dotcom boom, amazing fun, great contacts. Ancient computer system running
IBM OS/2, Netscape Gold(!) - had to fight for a Win laptop with 95 and IE on it -
stupid bosses (more on that later). 

Ancient copy management system with BASKETS etc. Newsrooms used to depend on
this.

Noticed that there was an email address to which one could file copy. Tested it -
it worked. How could I use this?


LUCKY: "original palm pilot"

I had a Palm. Who used to have a Palm? I got Ericcson SH888 and a GoType keyboard
and starteed reported from events. Noone else was doing this, except a few in the
specialist tech press. No-one on fleet st. This was cutting-edge shit.

LUCKY: "Ericcson SH888"
LUCKY: "Gotype keyboard images"

Tell Jeff Bezos story.

LUCKY: "avantgo"

Anyway: AvantGo. Bit like RSS - you signed up, picked your channels, synced
before you left the office, had buckets of stuff to read on train home.
Brilliant. That was as far as mobile news went.

Bosses in the newsroom were not impressed. 

(But bosses are often dim - tell "New" "Media" Correspondent story)

Leeds team were more interested. PA NewsCentre made a mobile version and an
AvantGo channel. They built WAP. They built web sites for mobile. But still,
management weren't interested.

Management = fat white men in their 50s. Moustaches. Former writers who no longer
wrote anything. 

___ WHEN THEY LOOKED AT NEWS ON MOBILE, THEY LAUGHED ___

They saw instantly that it was no competitor to the established way of doing
things. Nothing to see here, move along.

So mobile news - and mobile journalism - didn't advance as fast as perhaps it
should have done.

I don't want to sound like an Apple fanboy, but the iPhone has changed that
because IT HAS IMPACT.

Ever shown yours to people? Did they smile and laugh? How many other handsets
have done that?

___ IPHONE IS CATALYST FOR CHANGE ___

The fat white men can see the money. This particular set of fat white men have
not seen money in this location before. They like the idea.

Emily Bell, Guardian: "J will need to be comfortable in a new format on a smaller
screen, where the issue of -where you are- will become part of -how you are
reading-."

Walker Fenton, Newsgater Inc: "10 years ago it was should I have a web site? Now
it's should I have an iPhone app? The answer is yes: get on mobile now."

Say again: everyone in this room knew all this years ago. BUT NEWSPAPER
MANAGEMENT DIDN'T. Not until they saw how mobile news COULD BE, on the iPhone. 

Go back - back to the CEN. Peter Wells typing with his podgy fingers. Fierce,
terrible man. Also reasonable. Old-fashioned, old-school. National media is still
controlled by people like him. 

But not for much longer. 

Thanks for listening.

gilest.org


ENDS