Dashboard computing offers new distribution option for news, but don’t look for a revolution

This column appeared May 30, 2002, in the Online Journalism Review. Here’s the version on the OJR site.

By J.D. Lasica

Telematics just may be the most interesting new distribution vehicle for news that you’ve never heard of.

That’s because news makes up only a small slice of the cool, if pricey, features you’ll find in the telematics systems now showing up in dozens of car models.

First, let’s define the gangly little term. Telematics is a computerized system in a vehicle that connects you to services or content based on your location — current traffic conditions on the stretch of highway up ahead, for example, or a list of restaurants within a square mile.

Dashboard computing now comes in 2.5 million of the 220 million cars on the road in the United States. It’s catching on fast, so hang on for a quick crash look at a trend that’s coming soon to a car near you.

“We’re just now getting out of the pioneering stages and getting into the market takeoff stage,” says Phil Magney, principal analyst for the Telematics Research Group in Minnetonka, Minn. By 2007, the firm estimates, 42 percent of new cars sold in this country will come equipped with telematics devices.

Telematics features generally fall into four main buckets:

• Safety and security, including an automatic distress signal if your car crashes.

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Sprawling media empire can’t afford to sacrifice journalism on altar of corporate profits

This column appeared May 23, 2002, in the Online Journalism Review. Here’s the version on the OJR site.

By J.D. Lasica

When I gaze upon the lumbering beast known as AOL Time Warner, I’m reminded of the parable of the elephant and the blind men who, inspecting only one part of the animal, alternately suggested that the elephant must be very much like a tree, a snake, a rope, a wall, a spear, a fan.

When it comes to AOL Time Warner, point of view is all. And so we interviewed an AOL TW corporate executive; AOL’s news director; a rank-and-file reporter at one of its publications; three students who follow the news on AOL; and a veteran media critic. Each has a different take on how this beast is shaping up.

To freshen our allegory a bit, what we have here is not really an elephant at all but a genetic experiment: the world’s first bioengineered mega-business — the corporate equivalent of a geep or zorse, an unnatural hybrid genetically engineered to sustain itself on a force-fed diet of synergy.

Except the experiment hasn’t gone as its progenitors predicted.

Consider: Since the merger was announced on Jan. 10, 2000, the company’s value has decreased by a mind-blowing $160 billion. Last month, AOL Time Warner took a $54 billion quarterly write-down — the biggest quarterly loss in U.S. history. (To put that in perspective, the entire U.S. newspaper industry is worth $55 billion.) Last week, as new CEO Richard Parsons assumed the company’s reins, he signaled that a back-to-basics approach was in order, one that would focus on improving the fundamentals of the company’s individual business units.

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It’s time to add some movement to cartoons on content sites

This column appeared May 14, 2002, in the Online Journalism Review. Here’s the version on the OJR site.

By J.D. Lasica

Nearly a decade since the birth of Web publishing, you’ve got to wonder: Why don’t more content sites carry animated cartoons?

Three factors loom large: Holding down expenses in this cost-cutting era. The fact that fewer than one in six home users have high-speed broadband connections. And many of these newfangled moving cartoons are (shudder!) controversial.

To which I reply: Bosh! In many cases, the cost is a pittance. Tens of millions of us check in to news and content sites from offices with fat broadband pipes. As for controversy, its absence is what makes most news sites dull as doornails.

More important, though, is the principle involved. There’s no excuse for limiting your cartoon offerings — whether they’re political op-ed cartoons or comics — to transplanted print cartoons in a digital, interactive medium.

Cartoonist Mark Fiore puts it well: “This is a totally different medium, and you can do some many things you can’t do in a newspaper with animation and interactivity and sound. It makes my heart drop when you go to a news site and you see a cartoon that worked beautifully in print but just sits there on screen at 72 dpi (dots per square inch). It’s the worse of both worlds.”

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