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COM 203
Charles Jurries
Instructor: Dr. Bob
Essay #2

Augment My Reality: Utilizing the News for Mobile Phones

BlackBerrys, iPhones and Droids. Today’s smartphones utilize internet and streaming

data for a variety of functions, including maps, traffic information and music, among others, all

available on a pocket-sized device. An emerging technology for these advanced data phones is

known as “Augmented Reality,” which can scan whatever the phone’s camera is looking at, and

if it recognizes the person, place or object in its database, it will give you any available

information to be found on the thing, right then and there. Scan an apartment building, and find

out if there are any units for sale. When at an art museum, scan a work of art and find out more

information than the plaque can give. More to this technology being cool, it has the ability to be

beneficial and useful to the struggling news industry.

The news business is floundering, losing newspaper profits, failing to make substantial

amounts of money on the internet, all but giving up on radio, and having TV news be the butt of

many jokes. However, the news industry needs to work on archiving and cataloging their news

data now, in order to take advantage of these mobile technologies. Failure to plan ahead will

result in news organizations potentially losing valuable public information, looking “out of

touch” with technologies and failing to give the news where their audience has migrated.

Newspapers used to be “the news,” the only other medium to disseminate information

other than word-of-mouth. As such, newspapers were treated with a certain degree of care and

respect, and archived accordingly. A visit to any number of public libraries will show

newspapers carefully archived on microfiche, preserved so future generations would be able to

look back and see the news of the day. However, most news web sites, offer only up to two years
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of online content, some charging for access to the archives. If you are not willing to pay, then,

the data disappears completely from your internet. (LexisNexis, a popular internet archive and

research site, charges users for full access to their content as well.) Many local news web sites do

not offer a archive system for users, nor provide adequate searching for outdated stories. In order

to proceed in a mobile, minute-by-minute future, this needs to change.

A backlog of stories would allow for “perspective” when it comes to Augmented Reality

mobile applications. While researching that apartment complex on your phone, the most recent

story may be about a murder that took place recently, whereas a story from eight years ago

would show the complex won an award for being environmentally friendly. When at the art

museum, you would be able to know the last time that specific artists was featured in that

building, where all the art has been over the past decade or two. If the information was

considered important enough to be mentioned years ago, it is certainly worth mentioning once

again years later, in the spirit of context and understanding (Outing, 2003).

Another reasons news organizations need a better catalog of information is to regain

some likability in the eyes of the public. Only 20-30 percent of Americans believe what

traditional media outlets have to say, according to the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism

(Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2009). If news organizations want to regain the

popularity that most of us desire from our peers, they need to give others a reason to like them.

The first step in this would be by meeting people with new and emerging technologies, not

playing catch-up like many have and are doing with the internet and mobile.

As of April, 2009, Apple has sold well over 35 million units able to take advantage of

their applications (Marsal, 2009). The audience for mobile applications and technologies is

already there, and growing. With more “standard” cell phones becoming equipped with more

advanced technologies, it is not inconceivable that by the year 2020, the standard cell phone will
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be predominately used for data, and will be able to use applications. However, news

organizations shouldn’t wait for a New York Times cover story or a memo from the Poynter

Institute to tell them they need to get ready and figure out a strategy on how to meet and develop

this technology now. By the time the mobile audience is as standard as the web audience is now,

it will be too labor-intensive to try to take the digital back-catalog and figure how to adapt it a

mobile technology. Experiment with the technology now; develop how to display news

alongside the real estate and entertainment listings, and the audience will be thankful.

Why would they be thankful? You wouldn’t just get information on what something is

about, you would be able to know if it was controversial, if it inspired a community, if it was at

the center of a crime that inspired an episode of LAW AND ORDER. People may not trust the

news, but they still consume it in some small ways. By giving them relevant data in a relevant

manner, a way that is not preaching to them but rather, simply informing them, the news could

once again become a useful part of the everyday life. It would serve a different function, that of a

collaborator with other functions, rather than a stand-alone unit. Yet, in a day and age where

there’s all but no credibility left to lose, and everything to gain, with mediums that are dying or

broken, experimentation with technology like Augmented Reality, could be beneficial to not just

the news industry, but the industry’s relations with the public.

Bibliography
Marsal, K. (2009, April 23). Apple's iPod touch sales double, nearly on par with
iPhone. Retrieved November 24, 2009, from AppleInsider:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/04/23/apples_ipod_touch_sales_double_nea
rly_on_par_with_iphone.html
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Outing, S. (2003, January 8). Poynter Online. Retrieved November 24, 2009, from
The Archiving Mess: http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=31&aid=16322

Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. (2009). Public Attitudes . Retrieved from
Journalism.org:
http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2009/narrative_overview_publicattitudes.php?
cat=3&media=1