The way we obtain news has been changing. The number of people who get most, or even some, of their news from printed newspapers has declined drastically over the past 30 years. Television is still in the top position, but not for long. A Pew Research project shows that just under 60% of Americans often get news via television. About 38% cited on-line resources, 25% said radio, and just 20% mentioned print newspapers.
Clearly that’s why newspapers are doing everything they can to find a way to make on-line delivery profitable. Larger newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post are doing fine, but newspapers in smaller cities are struggling.
The New York Times, for example, now has 3.3 million paid digital subscribers and revenue from the digital side is about $442 million. Revenue from the print business is still more than double that that of digital, though. It’s possible, perhaps likely, that newspapers will become fully digital operations over time.
Newsweek tried that, but then had to return to a print version. The printed magazine is priced realistically at $140 per year while the digital-only version is $40. Time Magazine, however, seems to have the equation backwards: $40 per year for print and digital, $30 for print only. Just printing and postage probably cost more than that.
Television’s top position won’t last. The Pew Research project showed that 85% of those over 65 often get news from television and only 20% citied on-line. But look at the 18-29-year-old demographic: Under 30% cite television as a prime source of news and 50% said on-line. The survey was conducted early in 2016.
In 2013, 54% of the respondents in a similar survey said that they obtained news from digital resources at least some of the time. By 2016, that share had increased to 72%.
So clearly the future for the news business is digital. Not all digital news sites are equally usable, though. The illustrations here are all from an Ipad Pro with a 10.5-inch screen. That makes the device about the size of a magazine and the resolution is 264 pixels per inch. As a result, the digital display is at least as good as what can be produced by 4-color process printing used for magazines.
The New Yorker’s presentation on a tablet is the best I’ve seen. The table of contents appears just as it does in the magazine. Tapping one of the section headlines or story headlines navigates to that section or story, but you can also page through the magazine by swiping to the left. This could be cumbersome because the magazine has many long-form articles that fill many pages.
Swiping left or right navigates forward and backward one article at a time. Once an article is open, scrolling down reveals the full content.
This is a perfect solution that uses the tablet’s capabilities to the reader’s advantage. For example, I typically skip “Goings on About Town” because the information is useful only to those who are in New York City. Had the designer maintained a typical magazine page format, moving to the next section (“Talk of the Town”) would take 13 swipes. I often skip that section, too.
The New York Times and the Washington Post take completely different approaches to presenting a newspaper in electronic form. In the New York Times, the front page looks nothing like the newspaper. Instead, it contains information about the dozen or so articles deemed most noteworthy. An icon reveals a list of sections.
The Washington Post places two articles side-by-side. Each column scrolls independently of the other and additional items appear as the user swipes to the left. As with the New Yorker, each of the articles is in a single scrollable column. Those who prefer a wider text block can tap any column to make it full screen.
Time magazine maintains the look and feel of the print publication, which might be a bit chaotic for a small screen.
Broadcast news organizations seem not to have mastered website design to the extent that traditional publishers have. NPR displays lots of equal-size boxes so that it’s unclear which items might be more noteworthy. The BBC takes a similar approach.
ABC Television’s on-line presence needs to provide access to entertainment programs and news, so the user has to drill down from the top just to get to the news section.
The new media have the upper hand now because they were designed from the beginning with the internet in mind, but let’s not mistake the old media for dead just yet. There’s a lot of experimentation as organizations find the best way to present the contents of their newspaper, magazine, radio network, or television network in a different medium. The next few years, in addition to being interesting to watch, will determine the winners and losers as media evolve.
Adobe Spark has been aimed primarily at the general public, but features released this week make it a valuable component of Creative Cloud because users can now remove Adobe branding and apply their own brand. Better still, the application helps by making intelligent suggestions for colors and will even assist with creation of a logo.
Spark isn't new and I've demonstrated its capabilities before, but the ability to add your own brand colors and logo make it much more useful for professionals. There's a free version that anyone can sign up for, but it's also included with all Creative Cloud subscriptions -- and that included the $120/year Photography plan.
Graphics created in Spark can't be exported for use by Adobe's applications for professional designers, at least not yet, but all assets created in any of those applications can be used in Spark.
So I created a variant of the TechByter Worldwide website banner and uploaded it to Spark.
After examining the logo, Spark selected two colors that it recommend for the brand and then generated an array of themed items for social media, websites, print, and more. All of these can be modified by changing colors, typefaces, and spacing or by adding photos or other graphics.
And one final step: Typing the name of the brand.
Adobe Spark's premium features are included with all Creative Cloud subscriptions, but they're also available as a standalone application for computers and IOS mobile devices for $10 per month. (Hint: For the same price, you get Photoshop Lightroom, Photoshop, and Spark's premium features, so that's the one I'd suggest if you don't need InDesign, Illustrator, Audition, and the numerous tools for video.).
Here's a short video from Adobe that displays some of the key features in just 96 seconds.
The two examples at the top were created on an Ipad and the two at the bottom were created on the Spark website. The lower right item was one of my first tests that essentially remixed a sample file from the website.
If you're a professional, you're going to like the ability to use your own brandingThose who have Creative Cloud accounts will be able to use the enhanced Spark features without additional cost. This looks like a great way for people to create high-impact messages in -- literally -- just a few minutes. If you don't have a Creative Cloud account, you can still use the free version and have all of the features except your own branding.
Additional details are available on the Adobe website.
CCleaner (short for "Crap Cleaner") has been around for decades. It's a program that a lot of people use to clean up temporary files and remove unnecessary Registry keys, but a recent version was hacked and may have infected your computer.
Fortunately, that sounds a lot worse than it really is, but it's still a black eye for anti-virus firm Avast, which recently acquired CCleaner's parent company, Piriform. Version 5.33 is the hacked copy and since then a clean version, 5.34, has been released.
I had version 5.33 on one computer, but apparently had not run it. In any event, extensive scanning revealed no problems and 5.34 is now on all of my computers.
Avast says that 2.27 million users downloaded the compromised version of CCleaner, but the company says that it was able to disarm the threat before any harm was done. According to Piriform, the malicious payload grabbed the name of the computer, a list of installed software and Windows updates, a list of running processes, MAC addresses of the first three network adapters, and additional information such as whether the infected machine had administrator privileges. This appears to have been the first step in a multi-step attack and the second step was halted.
Piriform's Paul Yung, writing on the company website, says that it's unclear where the malware came from and how it was introduced into the application. The investigation is continuing.
If you use CCleaner, check to be sure that you're not using version 5.33. If you have an earlier version, skip directly to version 5.34. And if you find version 5.33, update to version 5.34 and then it wouldn't hurt to run a full scan. Version 5.34 is available from Piriform's website.
If you have an Android smart phone, it may have been infected with malware that made its way past the anti-malware protections in the Play store. More than 100 apps have been found with malware that sends premium-priced SMS message. This could be big. The applications in question have been downloaded at least 1 million times and possibly as many as 4.2 million times.
That's quite a range!
The infected apps have all been removed from the Play store, but they'll still be on your phone if you downloaded them and installed them.
There are warning signs for the apps. They will ask for internet access and other permissions. Many legitimate apps need various types of access and users tend to just glance at the list and click OK. The malware is called "ExpensiveWall" and it's a new variant of a malware found earlier this year on Google Play.
The CheckPoint blog lists the known infected apps here so now would be a good time to check the list, see if you installed any of them, and remove them if you did. At last check, 108 applications were listed.
Some of the app developers might not even know that they were shipping infected apps. ExpensiveWall appears to be spread by a software developer kit (SDK) called gtk. Developers use SDKs to provide common functions that their applications need. Before downloading an Android app, it's a good idea to see how many times the application has been downloaded and what kind of feedback it's getting. In other words, let somebody else experiment with the new apps and stick to ones that have been around for a while, have lots of downloads, are are the subject of good reviews. That's not a perfect system, but it does reduce the risk considerably.
My network connection vanished about 10:30 on the morning of September 15. At the time, I was connected to a client’s network. The first step was to find out what had gone wrong.
I thought it was the client’s network because attempt to connect to resources on that network failed. I was able to connect to resources not on the client’s network, but that was a false lead.
The root cause of the problem (spoiler alert) was my internet service provider’s nameservers. Service was intermittent during my testing, which is why some connections worked and others failed.
Research quickly revealed that the problem was not with the client’s network.
My cell phone can turn itself into a Wi-Fi hotspot, so I enabled that feature, connected to it, and was back in service with the client — although with a 30Mbps connection instead of 80Mbps.
After 4 hours of using the cell phone Wi-Fi, I started looking for a workaround. WOW still wasn’t able to provide an ETA.
The problem, as I noted in the spoiler alert, was Wide Open West’s nameservers, but not entirely. Because I know that WOW’s nameservers aren’t entirely reliable, my router points to the OpenDNS nameservers. They also were also not responding.
Google also provides a free nameserver service and when I pointed the router there, standard service was restored.
Google’s nameservers are useful. Some people use them all the time, but I keep them as a good backup alternative.
The IP addresses are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.
Once my connection had working nameservers again, everything was restored to full speed; but in the interim, it was certainly nice to have access via my cell phone even if it wasn’t as fast as I’d like.
Keep your cell phone in mind when other connections fail.
