Journalism without corners and edges
How Amazon and Apple challenge our journalistic thinking with circular displays. Suddenly the day’s topics are round. So is the news. Do we now have to produce content for round devices?
“Stepping to the Telephot on the side of the wall he pressed a group of buttons and in a few minutes the faceplate of the Telephot became luminous, revealing the face of a clean shaven man about thirty, a pleasant but serious face. As soon as he recognized the face of Ralph in his own Telephot he smiled and said, ‘Hello Ralph.’”
This is how Hugo Gernsback describes the telephoto in his 1911 novel “Ralph 124C41+”. A device with circular displays.
107 years later German news anchor Ingo Zamperoni appears with a green tie next to my bed. And everything around Zamperoni is: round. Zamperoni leads through the daily themes on my Amazon Echo Spot. The light blue Tagesthemen world map looks pleasantly round. But already on the boards behind Zamperoni parts of the inscription are missing. There are only things like “hancelor Merkel” and “onflict in overnement”. The rest is cut off.
Amazon gave his language assistant a display. With the Echo Spot it is: round. You have to be Jeff Bezos to throw a device with a round display into the world of square content.
The spot is really pretty: as big as a grapefruit, the elegant shape of a cut ball with a smooth surface. On voice command he reveals everything I want. So I didn’t even notice the circular display thing. But the longer I looked at Zamperoni in the blue round, the more strange the circular display seemed to me.
And round is not at all far-fetched. Even the first moving image of the camera obscura has been circular. Wristwatches and speedometers also: circular. There was the circular smartphone Runcible, as elegant as it was unsuccessful, circular Smartwatches, and also the digital nest thermostat. So now Amazon’s Echo Spot. Corners are so from 2017. Circular devices are simply nicer.
This presents our square journalistic thinking with a real challenge: How must headlines be structured so that they run smoothly? How bulbous can the text be? How long? And where does navigation belong? What is certain is that the text will be round. With all its market power, Amazon is pushing its Echo devices into our kitchens, bedrooms and living rooms. On the circular display of the spot on the bedside table, in the bathtub and next to the stove, we will soon take for granted the journalism that was previously found on our smartphones and tablets.
Apple has also been thinking about circular shapes for a long time. In the American patent with the number 9965995, granted in May 2018, Apple engineers describe the problems of displays with curved edges — and how they have solved them. Possibly for the upcoming Apple Watch.
Who will shot the first circular documentary?
It is undoubtedly difficult to design for the circular display: The menu doesn’t stop at an edge, when scrolling the text breaks constantly, there are no fixed line lengths. The square content on the round screens lacks the station logo, the corner flag of the football field and perhaps the murder weapon at the scene of the crime. For spring 2019, I firmly expect the first hyperventilating media conference panel discussion on the question of whether the bubble displays are withholding crucial information from the corners.
Anyone shooting the first circular documentary, developing a clever app for Circular News or a completely circular social network can make a name for themselves as a network provider in 2019. Media makers, free yourselves from the corners!
