AndrewBlum.net

Hard Focus (Print Mag)

Digital technology is transforming photojournalism in hot spots around the world. (link) (photo by Riccardo Gangale)

What does conflict look like? Some people are fortunate enough to know only from the photographs they see in newspapers and on the web. But between the moment a picture is taken and its appearance on our computer screen or in our morning paper there exists a technologically remarkable chain of communication. Gone are the days when photojournalists lugged a chunky Rolleiflex TLR into the field and sent film home on planes. Digital technology has streamlined the process—while adding a few of its own complications. To find out more about how technology is changing photojournalism, I tracked down a few of the conflict photographers who travel around the world from hot spot to hot spot, snapping images and sending them back to their editors at home.

Watch This Space (Print Magazine)

Publishers grapple with online video (link)

When President Clinton appeared—in video!—on my laptop screen in the fall of 1998, his index finger jabbing at Kenneth Starr, the future arrived with a shock: The news was no longer something you either watched or read. Somehow, the web was going to make it both, simultaneously.

Nine years later, we’re living in a YouTube world, and video has suddenly become a must-have for print publications—even the ones struggling to have an online presence at all. According to Bart Feder, president and CEO of The FeedRoom, the broadband video company of choice for many magazines and newspapers, “Over the last 18 months, every media company has begun to believe they need to be a digital media company.”

That goal still seems a long way off. Bringing online video up to the quality that most publications are producing in print remains a challenge, even for the best financed. Concierge, Condé Nast Traveler’s online home (and a FeedRoom client), has integrated video across the site, but the footage itself looks like an A/V club spree, a standard that would never fly in the magazine itself. And The New York Times may be adding web-video components to a remarkable number of stories, but much of it still looks like the local news—a substantial notch below the paper’s print reporting and photography.

The Big Pixel (Print Magazine)

The future of "mediatecture" (link)

In his 2001 book, Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies, architect James Sanders describes the relationship between the city and iconic films like Annie Hall and Miracle on 34th Street. Recently, though, as he discussed at a recent event in New York, Sanders has been thinking a lot about Shark Tale. True, it’s a movie about talking fish, but Sanders sees in it a compelling vision of a city of the future, in which the lines between real events and their video representation become blurred. In one scene, TV newscaster “Katie Current” reports live on a battle against a villainous shark. At the climactic moment, the shark smashes into an outdoor video screen—which turns out to be the very screen we’ve been watching Katie on, in the center of Times Square. In an explosion of flashbulbs and falling fish, we are confronted with what Sanders sees as the coming urban reality: a city that is simultaneously itself and its media representation.

Illuminated signs in public spaces have been around for a century, but recent advances in LED and projection technology are bringing us closer to truly transforming buildings into video screens. Boosters of this phenomenon call it “mediatecture.” For advertisers, it’s obviously irresistible; for the rest of us walking around the city, it could be either terrifying or thrilling. What’s clear is that the final effect depends enormously on designers and their ability to wrangle a larger canvas than ever before. We’ve arrived at a strange time when many designers must scramble to create good solutions for tiny cell-phone screens and, at the same time, devise the best approach for a quarter-acre of pixels.

Since the Sony JumboTron debuted at the 1985 world’s fair in Japan, enormous public video screens have become a familiar sight. But LED technology, with its lower operating temperatures, eliminates the need for big cooling mechanisms to be built behind the screen. The tipping-point products in this more streamlined genre have been developed by ag4, a German architecture and media design company, in partnership with GKD Metal Fabrics (which produces woven metal fabrics for interiors and exteriors). Mediamesh and Illumesh embed LEDs, along with all power and control cabling, into a structural metal mesh resembling an elegant security grate. The electronics are sleek enough to be transparent, so the screen can be used on a full facade without blocking daylight in or views out. For the same reason, it doesn’t look like a blank black wall when turned off. This doesn’t come cheap—prices hover around $200 per square foot—but that hasn’t prevented installation on a handful of buildings in Europe (including projects for Adidas and the 2006 Cannes Film Festival) and, soon, outside shopping malls in California.

The Times goes digital (again) - (Print Magazine)

[link] Among the legends of computer typography, two stand out. There’s an 18-year-old Steve Jobs stumbling into a calligraphy class at Reed College and learning about serifs and spacing—useless stuff, he thought, until it came time to design the first Mac. Then there’s Bill Hill and the coyote. An eccentric Glaswegian who sometimes still wears a kilt to his job as director of advanced reading technologies at Microsoft, Hill was tracking animals near his home when he had an epiphany: He was reading the tracks as if they were letters. Based on that notion, he wrote a treatise on pattern recognition, typography, and electronic reading. From the moment Bill Gates saw it, Microsoft got serious about e-reading.

Nick Bilton thinks about this often, sitting in the offices of The New York Times’ digital research and development lab. Bilton, who holds the dual title of art director and user-interface specialist, is the point person for Times Reader, one of the first of a new genre of Microsoft-developed digital publications that combine polished typography, tighter page design, and improved interfaces to take online reading beyond the browser.