Despite the fact that we’ve seen the death of traditional newspapers coming for a long time, actually seeing it happen is still pretty shocking.

The Seattle PI has announced that its days are numbered – at 60:

After 146 years of delivering news, the Seattle P-I faces becoming what it has chronicled: history.

Economic reasons have forced the state’s oldest morning newspaper into a sale, Steven Swartz, president of The Hearst Corp.’s newspaper division, told employees Friday.

“Since 2000, the P-I has lost money each year, and the losses have escalated and continue to escalate in 2009. We have had to make a very tough decision.”

Editorial cartoonist David Horsey was nearly speechless.

“This is awful, awful, awful,” he said afterward. “I was just standing there looking around at all these people I love to work with. I don’t want this to happen to me or them.”

He said that he’s been watching the news about the newspaper troubles nationwide, but that doesn’t make it any easier to understand the business reasons behind the decision.

“You realize you’re part of a huge implosion of the newspaper industry,” he said.

Does your local newspaper have long to live? Do you think there’s a way for traditional newspapers to beat this trend?

Looking at the current economic climate is, for the most part, an unhappy activity. Reports about retail sales, advertising, employment, stock prices, and industrial activity from the past several quarters is dismal. Forecasts for the year to come are gloomy.

Two, or five, or ten years from now, we will all look back with a clearer perspective, not only on the combination of events that led to this worldwide recession, but also with a view toward which businesses and institutions and industries were able to revamp, refocus, and thrive in the wake of a global meltdown.

This week, two very different podcasts came across my desk (so to speak) which speak to revamping and adapting for a the recovery to come. Both address the same general topic, but one looks at change from an industry vantage point, the other focuses on change from within. Best of all, one feels cautiously optimistic about things to come after giving a listen.

Tech industry giant IBM looks at the big-picture view with its “Building A Smarter Planet” blog and podcast. It posits, “The systems that make the world work, including healthcare, food, traffic, energy, water and financial systems, are all in need of dramatic change. [this blog and podcast] is aimed at discussing the problems and potential solutions for addressing these challenges.”

The current episode looks at the retail sector of the economy, and how companies need to respond to unprecedented economic pressures and discerning customers. The feed for the entire blog and podcast series is here.

The other podcast looks at change in turbulent economic times from a much more personal perspective. Susan Bratton, host of Dishy Mix and Founder of the Personal Life Media network, has an excellent 35-minute podcast episode, called “Managing Through Change: A Personal and Professional Workshop.”

While the basis of her podcast initially came from a digital advertising workshop she conducted, it makes for thought-provoking listening on your own – even if your work isn’t connected to the advertising industry. Her suggestions for managing through change are applicable in all kinds of situaitons.

Bratton takes listeners through a process of re-evaluating one’s own instinctive reactions to change, and offers a variety of methods for examining and reshaping those knee-jerk actions. She talks about confronting fears, gives ideas for increasing communication with others during times of change, and offers suggestions for striking a healthful work/life balance.

Dishy Mix typically features Bratton interviewing folks from the world of digital media, advertising, marketing, social media and Web 2.0. The feed for the series is here.

Michael Geoghegan, veteran podcaster, author and co founder of training seminar series The Podcast Academy, is offering download access to the complete recordings for Podcast Academy #1. The catch? The podcast recordings, long out of circulation, are available for today only, only to visitors who complete a quick 10-question survey.

The first Podcast Academy was held in 2005, concurrently with the first Portable Media Expo (which evolved into the New Media Expo, and recently became the Blog World & New Media Expo). The nine sessions (five hours of content in all) are surprisingly evergreen, and include topics such as:

• Daniel Steinberg of O’Reilly on Advanced Audio Editing Techniques,
• Josh Bancroft (Intel, Tiny Screenfuls) on Podcasting From Mobile Devices
• Todd Cochrane (Blubrry, Geek News Central) on Building A Podcast Network
• Michael Geoghegan (Grape Radio, Podcast Academy, Gigavox) on Making Money Beyond Podcasting

plus several other panel discussions on business podcasting, studio setups, audience building and more.

The survey readers must complete in trade for access to the recordings is short (took me a couple minutes), focusing on your level of involvement and expertise with podcasting, and what sorts of learning opportunities you have had in the past, and might look for in the coming year, to enhance your podcast and new media skills. Geoghegan says they are looking for reader/listener input as they plan course offerings for 2009.

Information about the Podcast Academy recordings and the survey are here.

Samson Technologies, the US distributor of the Zoom recorder, and audio software developer Immersive Media Research (IMR) today announced what they are calling “the missing link” for owners of Zoom’s H2 Handy Recorder. The Vortex Zoom Encoder has a streamlined program for sharing audio recordings, for both Mac OS X and Windows operating systems, and in multiple output formats.

Samson will be displaying the H2 and a other new products this week at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and next week in Anaheim at the NAMM show.

The Zoom H2 boasts four built-in microphones, and captures 360-degree sound into two stereo WAV files. The new Vortex Zoom Encoder converts H2 dual-stereo recordings into standard formats for sharing and use in familiar programs, portable media devices, and home theater systems.

Vortex Zoom Encoder runs on Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista. The encoder program operates in full-featured mode for 30 days and then reverts to a handy, free player for Zoom H2 surround files, allowing users to hear their four-channel recordings through four speakers. Users can unlock and restore DTS, Binaural, and 5.1 WAV encoding for $25.

Check out this $200 blogging netbook from Freescale:

Created in concert with Pegatron, the reference design features the i.MX515 processor, Canonical’s Ubuntu operating system, a new power management IC from Freescale, the SGTL5000 ultra low-power audio codec and Adobe Flash Lit software, Adobe’s Flash Player for mobile phones
and devices.

Integrating an ARM Cortex-A8 core and manufactured using 65-nm process technology, Freescale’s new i.MX515 provides up to 2100 Dhrystone MIPS and can scale in performance from 600MHz to 1GHz. Advanced power management features included in the i.MX515 processor, such as a dedicated, hardware-based video acceleration block, allow for extended battery life and eliminate the need for fans or heat sinks.

The i.MX51 is one of the only processors to offer both OpenVG and OpenGL graphics cores, thereby enabling 2D and 3D graphics as well as Flash and SVG for enhanced user experiences. Video created for the Adobe Player is one of the leading video formats on the Internet today. Working with Adobe, Freescale plans to enable the Adobe software to run on the processor’s dedicated OpenVG graphics block, thereby extending battery life and enabling netbook web browsing experiences as rich and responsive as those on traditional PCs.

Freescale’s netbook reference design is available now. Volume production for the i.MX515 device is planned for Q2 2009 to power netbooks designed for the 2009 holiday shopping season.

These devices are wimpy – but they are also cheap, cute and good enough to stand in for real laptops for a lot of chores – like blogging and micropublishing.

In related news – the One Laptop Per Child project has announced that it’s laying off half of its staff. The OLPC laptop obviously has different goals than these netbooks, but can the non-profit continue to make laptops when they’re being undercut by mainstream devices?

Do you think that these cheap netbooks make the original focus of the OLPC project obsolete?

Wine Library TV’s Gary Vaynerchuk has a great story to tell about getting your site hacked and dealing with bad publicity in real time.

Do you think a large corporation can react like this – in “new media time”?

via TechCrunch

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this week, networking hardware maker Netgear unveils two new Internet-connected set-top boxes.

Netgear’s product launch comes amid a flurry of announcements and launches of other Internet-ready televisions and digital video players and recorders: the Roku digital video player‘s partnership with Amazon, Netflix-enabled televisions, among others.

The company says the pair of Netgear TV boxes promise to “bring the world of Internet videos, live Internet TV, YouTube, popular websites, HD media collections, family photos, music and more to the TV.”

Hmmmmm. Just like the Apple TV box we’ve had in the TV room for the longest time.

“Internet video consumption is at an all-time high,” said Vivek Pathela, Netgear vice president and general manager of home/consumer products. “Just in the month of October 2008 alone, comScore estimated that almost half of the total U.S. population viewed more than 13.5 billion online videos. That’s a large number of Internet videos, that are viewed mostly on PCs, even though many people would rather watch them on their TVs.”

Eye-Fi today announced that it is developing a way to enable users to wirelessly upload videos from a digital camera to YouTube and/or to a home computer. Eye-Fi currently makes a wireless SD memory card for digital cameras.

“We’re aiming to do for video what we’ve already done for photos: provide the easiest, simplest way to save and share your digital memories,” said Jef Holove, CEO for Eye-Fi.

Eye-Fi’s wireless SD memory cards allow digital camera users to upload photos, and soon video, automatically through Wi-Fi networks. In addition, Eye-Fi hotspot subscribers can also upload their memories away from home at more than 10,000 Wayport and open hotspot locations across the U.S.

The company is designing its video upload service to support full-resolution HD video, with newer still cameras like the Nikon D90 capturing HD video, and Web sites including YouTube now testing display of HD video.

“Some of the most popular clips on YouTube are shot on digital cameras, rather than video camcorders,” said Ziv Gillat, vice president of business development for Eye-Fi. “[our product] will mak[e] it even easier …to post life events, home videos and breaking news – virtually as they happen.”

The company will preview the technology this week at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

There’s an interesting article about Internet analyst Clay Shirky and his ideas for the future of traditional media at the Guardian today.

In the article, Shirky paints a dim picture for the future of newspapers:

Even if we have the shallowest recession and advertising comes back as it inevitably does, more of it will go to the web.

I think that’s it for newspapers. What we saw happen to the Christian Science Monitor [the international paper shifted its daily news operation online] is going to happen three or four dozen times (globally) in the next year.

The 500-year-old accident of economics occasioned by the printing press – high upfront cost and filtering happening at the source of publication – is over.

But will the New York Times still exist on paper? Of course, because people will hit the print button.

He goes on to make similar predictions for magazines and television. 

While traditional media companies are going to face unprecedented challenges in 2009, their future is probably not as cut and dry as Shirky makes it.

New media can radically undercut traditional media when it comes to some content – like news and gossip. Other content, though, like complex television productions, will have a lot more time to adjust to the new landscape.

Apple wrapped up its last MacWorld Expo keynote today, delivering a fairly ho-hum collection of incremental updates:

• iTunes Store - Beginning today, all four major music labels — Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner Music Group and EMI — and thousands of independent labels, will offer their music in the DRM-free iTunes Plus format with higher-quality 256 kbps AAC encoding. iTunes customers can also now purchase and download songs directly onto their iPhone 3G over their 3G network — just as they do with Wi-Fi today — for the same price as downloading to their computer. And in April, song pricing on iTunes will get a bit more complicated, with tracks selling for 69¢, 99¢, or $1.29, depending on their age.
• 17-inch MacBook Pro Update - The updated 17-inch MacBook Pro features an aluminum unibody enclosure and a non-removable battery delivering up to 8 hours of use and up to 1,000 recharges. It has a high resolution LED-backlit display and the same large glass Multi-Touch trackpad introduced with the new MacBook family. 
• iLife ’09 - Apple today unveiled iLife ’09, which includes upgrades to iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand and an updated version of iWeb.
  • iPhoto ’09 introduces Faces and Places, ways to easily organize and manage photos based on who appears in them and where they were taken.
  • iMovie ’09 adds new features that let you create a movie quickly or add refinements and special effects if you have more time. 
  • GarageBand ’09 offers a new way to learn to play piano and guitar with Basic Lessons, which teach fundamentals, and Artist Lessons (sold separately), in which original artists teach you how to play the songs they made famous. 
• iWork ’09 - adds new features to each of its productivity applications.
  • Keynote ’09 introduces Magic Move, which offers an easy way to automatically animate any image, graphic or text repeated on consecutive slides.
  • In Pages ’09, a new Full Screen view lets you focus solely on your writing while the new outline mode lets you organize your thoughts. 
  • Numbers ’09 introduces a quick way to group and summarize data and a dramatically simplified way to create complex formulas. Apple also introduced the public beta of iWork.com, a new service for sharing documents online. 
• FileMaker Pro 10 - The new version focuses on an updated user interface. For example, database users can now place frequently used FileMaker features in the redesigned and customizable Status Toolbar, resulting in streamlined navigation, better workflow, and time-saving shortcuts. 

All-in-all, it’s a stretch to even call the updates evolutionary, let alone revolutionary. 

From a new media perspective, the highlights of the announcements are iMovie ’09, which may be good enough to finally get people to switch from iMovie HD; and the 17″ MacBook Pro – which may not be a surprise, but is still pretty droolworthy.