Bigger Than Bits

As some readers of the Times may have noticed, I’ve got a new role. I’m now covering telecommunications, both for the Bits blog and for what we refer to as “the paper,” which really means longer articles both in print and online.

The immediate reason behind the switch was simple and common enough: The Times needed a body, and I was there. Matt Richtel, who has been covering telecom (with Jenna Worthham who continues to do so), is now working on some special projects. So someone needed to write about telephone, cable and related companies.

When Damon Darlin, the technology editor, asked if I was interested in filling in for Matt, I leaped at the chance. That was a change for me. A few years ago, I had turned down an offer of the telecom beat. I thought that the companies were too big and slow. I had already spend enough of my life covering banks.

But over the past two years editing Bits, I have come to become very interested in so many issues related to communications networks and the devices that connect to them.  Apple’s iPhone and everything spawned has been the single most frequent topic on Bits.  I also wrote about last year’s auction of the radio spectrum now abandoned by analog television, giving me an introduction to covering the Federal Communications Commission. And earlier this year, I got fed up with people hearing about how broadband was faster and cheaper in other countries, and I wrote a series of posts explaining what is and isn’t different about the United States.

I’m defining the telecommunications beat as business that moves information from here to there, whether by wires or radio waves. That includes cable and satellite TV companies, many of which increasingly resemble phone companies.

All Saul, All the Time

Like lots of people, I express myself in lots of places online--Twitter, this blog, and the various formats on NYTimes.com. To make give my loyal fans (both of you), a way to keep up with my every peep, I've created the All Saul Feed. You can see my tweets, posts and contributions to the Bits "What We're Reading" feature, on this page. You can subscribe to the All Saul Feed with an RSS reader here. You can ignore my various rants everywhere else.

Widgets at the Times

Times Widgets is a new feature that lets several feeds from Times content be displayed. It looks much like the Most E-mailed list we have on the site. Here is a widget I made of our tech coverage.

For PR Pitches: Think about Gmail SEO

Every now and then I have a dialog with people in the public relations industry about how they can do their job better by helping reporters do our jobs better. I had a thought recently, and sent this e-mail to a few folks who are thoughtful about PR. 

I've got an idea that may be worth getting into the PR community. I don't have the time or forum, but one or both of you might be interested. 

I was responding to a pr pitch about a widget company, and i wrote this back:

Keep me posted on what these folks are up to, with an occasional e-mail. Don't worry if I don't respond. The way my life seems to work, suddenly something happens, and then I'll be interested in, say widgets. I'll remember you sent me something on a cool widget company, search my e-mail and get on the phone. 

When I sent it, I realized that I'm probably not alone in how gmail and other e-mail search is changing how I find information. And I wonder if PR people should think about what tools of search engine optimization apply to pitches:

• If a reporter was working on a story and needed to talk to your client, what terms would they search for, and are those the ones you use in the pitch?
  
• How would the headline and first paragraph of the pitch tell them the areas in which your client has unique knowledge? 
  
• Is there contact information that will allow them to find your client very quickly  on deadline?
  

This is a self serving thought. My biggest problem with pitches is that at least half the ones I get, I can't understand what the company does that the pitch is about. Often, the pitch is so wound up trying to define some sort of cute trend the company fits into that they don't actually give the who-what-where-when. And too many pitches use such obscure jargon, that they are impenetrable.  Allow me to vent on this for one second, with a the first paragraph of a pitch I got yesterday:

Hope you're well. I'd like to introduce you to xxxx , a new, place-based out-of-home digital network that delivers relevant, localized media within the rhythm of consumers' daily rituals, like afternoon coffee or sandwiches at lunch. 

It turns out that the company puts video billboards in delis. My hope is that if people realize that a reporter is much more likely to search for "video billboard" than " place-based out-of-home digital network" this may be an incentive for PR people to brush up on their English a bit. 

 

I've decided to add some occasional posts here, in addition to Bits.

I saw Frank Shaw comment on an blog post, talking about the Darwinian pressures on the news business. Yes things are changing, but I find much of the talk about MSM to be overstated and not so precise. I left this comment on Frank's blog:

Frank you still overstate the change.

Big picture: There is a modest evolution in the content model for news media (More competition and distribution options, more interactivity and user involvement, faster time frame). For newspapers certainly, the advent of the Web is far easier than the advent of television. All this other stuff is hooey.

Most media have the same business model: attract an audience and sell it to advertisers. Subscription revenue is harder to come by.

The only real revolution, I'm sorry to say, is with newspapers, which made so much money from advertising (classified, etc) that was related to their distribution, not their content.

All that really means is that newspapers will have to get smaller until their news budget matches the ad revenue from the content they produce. 

Cheers 

Saul

A new blog for me

After posting just a few times here, I've gone pro.
My blogging work can now be seen on nytimes.com/bits.

Replicators: The Next Generation

I received a lot of e-mail about my article on 3D printing in Monday's Times, including some interesting meditations on the possible good and bad uses for such machines. I've posted a few of these e-mails below. (There was also a fair bit of discussion on Digg and other blogs.)

Of course, there was discussion of what I left out, such as laser mills and other ways to fabricate objects. I got a nice note from the people behind RepRap, a 3d printer project at Bath University.

Several people pointed out that as with ink jet printers, the materials that go in to 3D printers may well cost far more than the printer itself over a lifetime. This is true, and desktop factory says it plans to use that razor/razor blade business model. It says the cost of material may be several dollars for a small object, not trivial but perhaps competitive for the Wal-Mart price for a napkin holder or whatever.

A few zoologically inclined pointed out that we wrote that "Mr. Gross even downloaded a model of an octopus to print out for a project on vertebrates in his daughter's eighth-grade biology class." Octopi, in fact, are invertebrates, as I'm sure Mr. Gross's daughter knows.

But by far the biggest comment was on my Star Trek reference.

I wrote: "It's not quite the transporter of "Star Trek," but it is a step closer."

This dates me, I'm sorry to say, to the 23^rd century, when the original Enterprise travelled the universe. While I can throw around references to Tribbles and tricorders, my knowledge of the technology of Captain Picard, Data and the 24^th century voyagers is rather sketchy.

So while I was thinking of a transporter materializing an object (yes I know sent from somewhere else). Little did I know that a major feature of later Star Trek was the Replicator , which from which Captain Picard orders his "Tea, Earl Grey, hot" out of thin air.

Eva was kind enough to point me to the Wikipedia article on Replicators, which helpfully explains the (faux) physics of all this, and the differences with transporters. If ever we needed a demonstration about what Wikipedia has over Britannica, it's the care in which readers have crafted the hundreds of Star Trek entries. (Reading the Chronicles of Narnia to my daughter, I found similarly extensive Narnian guides.)

Jason Warriner, an Oakland, California artist, pointed to the work he makes using 3D printers.

 

Below are a few comments from my e-mail bag.

In regards to your article on 3d printers, I found the possibilities to be immense. While you concentrated on the positives, consider some of the risks. The technology is still at its infancy. However, what is to say that years from now, people just won't print up a ceramic or plastic gun? Or even simpler, how about a disturbed teen in a hs printing up a knife? the potential for good from this technology is immense. However, to not consider all of the ramifications, would be foolish.

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That's gonna be very trippy: - China loses its manufacturing advantage - Much easier and cheaper to meet everyone's living needs around the world (you can manufacture what they need on the spot, including equip, water, food) - evil people can make lots of bad stuff easily... Thanks for the interesting read!

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Anything can now be made and that can be a problem. How about the slide of a gun or some other weapon parts? So there is a huge plus and a bit of a dark side to this emerging technology. In a few years, we will be able to do just about anything.

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A couple years ago, when i went to the design expo in nyc i went with an interest in seeing how the 3d printing world was coming along. and i did a sort of intellectual exercise. i wondered, what would it be like if everybody had access to these machines. for one thing, there would get to be a really popular public domain trade in trinkets like toothbrushes, and chess pieces. a few years ago, somebody designed a 3d public domain chess set. one of the fascinating things about the set was that it contained things like a rook that had open windows, people inside, and a double helix spiral stairway, which is completely impossible to make with standard injection molding techniques. i first saw the rook at one booth in the show, where a company was showing off their laser sintering machine. the rook was made from brass. Of course i was taken by the fact that there was an object, which looked just like something conventionally manufactured, that was impossible to make that way since it could not be divided in half and put together, as injection molded things are made. They were also showing off another example of this idea with something called the 'brain gear,' which had a bunch of interconnected gears that would be impossible to actually put together without breaking some. before 3d printing such a thing was merely a thought exercise. i noticed a trend starting, when upon walking the show, i noticed these exact same objects in other booths, made from various different materials. furthermore, there were also some examples of times that people took a photo of something they thought was interesting, like a stained glass detail in a church, then they took those into 3d software, embellished, then 'printed out' metal amulets made from that design for a wedding party. One company had scanned in a ken doll, and was printing, in sections, a six foot high version, made from plastic. Here was, in microcosm, a taste of the future, where people have unlimited access to these machines (in this case the small community of employees working for the various printer companies). I could easily see a future where various 3d objects are conceived by random people, or pirated, or just shared by the masses. Then people download that and print it out, just like they do with little pieces of software and art today. This is, of course, part of the logical progression that goes from being able to create something and share it online. its why we don't really have to worry too much about chinese manufacturing. after all, not too far in the future, we'll just print out whatever it is we need in our house. then recycle used or broken things, back into the printer. and once we get to full blown nanotechnology, this whole process will finally bring us to a stage where no good is 'manufactured' in a plant, but merely home grown.