Required for innnovation: Openness to try new things

I attended a session of the ONA conference yesterday about future publishing concepts. As one of the speakers, Erik Schwartz, was demonstrating narrowcasting, I overheard a disturbing remark by one of the conference attendees seated in front of me.

Narrowcasting is essentially the idea of taking podcasting and making it available on cell phones, instead of iPods (and other MP3 players). It makes sense to me, because your iPod can’t continue to receive updates (unless you have the iPod Touch and are in a wifi zone) but a cell phone can. It appears on your phone like a text message, but then plays an audio clip.

“I would never do that,” said the woman in front of me. On its face, that’s fine. This stuff isn’t for everyone. But anyone attending this conference, one would assume, is somehow connected to the news industry or journalism education. And the default attitude for everyone needs to be: “I need to try that and experience it, then decide whether or not it’s worth pursuing.”

Posted by MarkBriggs on Saturday, October 20, 2007
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