What we’re reading this week

Even journalism students don’t read news apps

I did a talk last night at my old university to around 30 students that professed by their attendance that they wanted to work in journalism. My slides from my talk you can find here (I did not choose or follow the title of the talk) but I did come across a few discoveries when playing a game with the room.

I asked everyone to raise their hands when they saw an app icon that they had installed on their phone, and they had opened it in the last week.

First I showed them a series of social apps: Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp (all owned by Facebook) and Twitter. By the first app I had nearly 100% of the audience, by the second, I hit 100%. I asked everyone to put their hands down and went through one by one. Twitter was by far the worst performer. Everything else had 80% uptake or higher.

Then I showed a bunch of news applications (and a lot more of them): The New York Times, The Guardian, BuzzFeed, VICE News, BBC News and MailOnline. Of all of them, combined, around 30% of the room had their hands raised.

These are supposed to be people that are interested in journalism, becoming journalists, and only 30% of them consume the biggest free content on their phones outside of their adblocking browser or third-party social platforms.

Correlating not only with the fact that fewer of our apps are doing more (as discussed last week), but also how BuzzFeed’s video strategy is very platform-centric, moving away from their site being the destination, to their content being consumed wherever. Fewer than 5% of BuzzFeed video views are on BuzzFeed.com.

The end of the law of computing

Ten years ago last month Intel introduced the ‘Core’ series of processors, introducing for the first time a dual-core architecture to consumer computing. Processors before then had been growing exponentially in power, measured only (typically) by the number of GHz one put out. Suddenly processors got slower, because we decided we were going to stick two of them on the same chip. Why? Because we were reaching the limits of what was energy efficient, practical to produce, and computationally useful.

Again though we saw processors follow Moore’s law, doubling in power every eighteen months, either through the clock speed rising, or through the addition of more cores. A modern top-end consumer processor today has up to eight cores clocked at over 3GHz.

Intel have however finally called an end to Moore’s law, saying that computing in the future (which is heading much more into the mobile world) is going to be slower, but more power-efficient. Currently a processor can typically have billions of transistors, just tens of nanometers in size, on one thumb-sized chip. Speeds of processors will not only halt, but will fall back as the technology changes towards as semi-quantum computing world.

In short, things are fast enough, but our phones and tablets and laptops don’t last long enough. What a surprise.

Also

• Just as journalists are being made obsolete in the world of breaking financial news, we can now share our sorrow with another profession soon to be made of cogs and gear (metaphorically). Jukedeck have been around since they released a product late last year, generating audio of different genres and moods up to five minutes, but recently released a new piano setting. It’s free to create and listen to a track so give it a try, or hear what I made earlier.
• Twitter as an acquisition target could be quite a good catch. Their ARPU (annual revenue per user) is over half that of Facebook, and rising, at a much lower pricetag ($6.87 in 2015). This is compared to a measly 30 cents for Snapchat, currently valued at $16bn off-market, $5bn more than Twitter’s market cap.