Amazon’s just gone and announced a new Kindle. Their pitch with this one is that it’s fantastic for reading two things in particular: textbooks and newspapers. This is very interesting to me, but I think there are gaping holes in the business model for each. Particularly with newspapers, I don’t think the Kindle delivery method is actually going to get them anywhere.

Quick unrelated side note: I find it odd that textbook writers actually want to sell their stuff on Kindle with so much of a price cut. I must admit that I do not own a Kindle (though I did play with one for a second a while back) but I find it hard to believe that college students would use it like Amazon is pitching. What if I want to be comparing two textbooks? It seems cumbersome to have to switch back and forth between them. What if I wanted to make a copy of a page from a Kindle textbook? I’d guess it wouldn’t work too well (though interestingly, I don’t see any record of someone actually sticking a Kindle in a photocopier — someone should try!). My point here is that I don’t see the Kindle and textbooks as particularly fitting partners. UPDATE: Looks like Wired feels the same way, and hey, they’ve even quoted a few Twitter users–remember that.

But that’s beside the point. The most interesting thing about Kindle DX pitch is that a lot of the blogosphere is wondering whether the device will save newspapers. It won’t. Kindle is a specialized device, built for book-reading, and it’s very very good at this. But the layout of a newspaper is very different from that of a book, and Kindle (even Kindle DX) isn’t really designed to handle it. Amazon may choose to work towards fixing this in future DX revisions, but I can’t see it flying. Adam Ostrow at mashable even admits that the Kindle is at least a couple years away from making an impact on the newspaper industry, and by that time it’ll be too late. I think I could count on two fingers the number of years it’ll take before print journalism as we know it collapses.

The problem with journalism as it stands now

No, the true fact of the matter is that the problem is much deeper than that. Newspapers have built an industry on the printing press for the past 400 years, but in reality print is not a very good delivery system for news. Think about it: a “current event” has to be processed, printed, and delivered before anybody will know about it. That’s a pretty large turnaround time.

I think in a few hundred years, people will look back and see paper as just a holdover until journalism’s true medium appeared. The Internet is the perfect news delivery system: it’s first-person, it’s always available, always up-to-date, and most importantly, it’s fast. Not just fast, it’s instant delivery.

And the Internet is causing all sorts of headaches for print newspaper executives who’ve gone to school and been educated on 400 years worth of newspaper knowledge that’s suddenly not very valuable. They’ve learned that journalism is a linear process that looks something like this:

1. Find an interesting event
2. Research the interesting event
3. Write a story about the event
4. Send story to editors

I suppose this could be expanded, if you were to include the delivery system as well, to include these:

1. Lay out stories in a visually-appealing way
2. Send layout to publisher
3. Print hundreds / thousands / millions of copies
4. Distribute physical copies all over the city / country / world

This whole thing is messy and takes a lot of time. The Internet is opening this process up to the masses as well as making everybody a participant. Newspapers have been trying to become more interactive forever, with such things as “letters to the editor.” Specifically, I see two major ways the Internet will change journalism.

The future-era source of news

Right now, the source of news for most people is the newspaper. Or at least it looks that way on the surface. The true source can be traced further back than that. It can’t be in the newspaper until a reporter writes an article about it. The reporter can’t write anything until he knows about the news. The reporter won’t know about the news in a timely fashion unless he goes to the scene and does research. Generally the reporter does two things as part of this research:

1. Asking people what happened and what they think about it
2. Recording the reporter’s own insights on the story

So, in the old model, the reporter is the source of news. This leads to in-depth, informative stories that make the reader understand, at the cost of being timely.

Under the new, Internet-centric model, the reporter is eliminated. The source of news is decentralized, because the news is “reported” by the participants. People are already starting to break news on services like Facebook and Twitter, and with the increasing prevalence of mobile Internet-enabled devices, this will only become more common.

Emily Knorr, a junior at Timpanogos High School and a participant in the school’s journalism program, sees the potential for this type of reporting. “I believe that people will get their news from the Internet, from each other, on [sites like] Facebook,” she says. “I think everyone will be journalists.

It’s already starting to happen. I think Twitter (and Twitter-clones to come) is poised to become the next generation source of news. When U.S. Airways pilot Chesley Sullenberger landed his Airbus in the Hudson, Twitter was “on the scene” way before anybody else, simply because with Twitter, the public is the reporter. Armed with just his iPhone, Janis Krums explained the situation and even included a picture within minutes. I can’t help but wonder what 9/11 would have been like if it happened in the current age of technology.

I need to clarify here that the death of print journalism does not necessarily spell the death of reporters. We’ll always need reporters to organize the facts and attend pre-planned events for the rest of us. Liveblogs are becoming a popular reporting method on the Internet, and I think they’re very effective. They provide specific, clear information very near to real-time and also give people who don’t want or have time to do their own research a place to go for the (e-)Reader’s Digest version. But liveblogs require reporters. Engadget, for example, had to send out some reporters to Pace University in New York to cover the Kindle DX launch.

The distribution of news

On the Internet, the distribution is personalized. If I want my news sent to my phone in real-time, I can have it texted to me. Twitter offers SMS delivery of a person’s tweets. If I want to sit down and read all my news, I can hand-pick what type of news I’m interested in and have it all waiting for me in one place with RSS.

In the future, news you want will come to you. But before that can happen, it’s got to be processed somehow. At 140 characters, Twitter updates aren’t very great at portraying details. I imagine the future of journalism will be mostly monitoring the Internet for new stories to talk about. As services like twitter become more common and more utilized on mobile devices, details about anything and everything will already be online. The only thing that’s left is some organization. This is just about what Wired’s done with that above-mentioned Kindle-DX-and-textbooks piece: they’ve quoted Twitter users–no need to even step away from the computer.

Say you want to run a news website in this new generation. Instead of having an army of field reporters, all you need to do is find a good way to parse through this flood of online reporting and organize relevant details into some semblance of an article. Twitter Search already provides an interesting way to watch the flow of specific news in real-time, and this is where news will come from. Just for fun, I found a popular twitter term (which happens to be #jonaslive at the moment) and saw that it took about 15 seconds for over 100 tweets to be published. That’s a lot of perspective.

So for your news website, you’ll take these incoming waves of information, find enough details to clarify what’s going on and to satisfy your audience, and put them in an article. You publish it to your site, and people use your revolutionary SMS Reporting feature and top-selling iPhone app to find out about it within minutes. With the Internet, we can cut all the time out of the last-generation delivery system. The Internet-centric system consists of one step; after the author sends their writing to the “editor:”

1. Instantly displayed on a website and pushed to readers through Facebook, twitter, RSS, text messages, etc.

In summary, the journalism industry is changing fast. No longer will one group manage the end-to-end system of producing news. Instead, the people who are already involved will be the reporters, and the whole business behind journalism will be distribution. If you find a clever way to deliver news to your audience, you succeed. Maybe you have a neat algorithm for automatically figuring out what news a user wants, like Pandora does for music. But if you copy everyone else, you fail.

On the Internet, there only needs to be one market leader; geographic boundaries do not create markets to the same extent as they do for the print industry. It’s the worst fear of newspaper execs, but it’s how the future will work. Most of them will not survive the transition; there’s not enough room on the Internet for thousands of news services.

So here’s some advice to newspaper companies: accept your fate before everyone else does and get ahead in the game. It’s the only way you’ll have a chance at preserving your importance when the newspaper dies. The five or ten to get it right quickly will see huge increases in audience as they go global, but everyone else will die under the pressure.

Apple’s new MacBooks and MacBook Pros are fairly impressive on a variety of fronts, but perhaps the updated graphics cards are the most exciting part of the package.

The new notebook has been graced with the presence of NVIDIA’s newest card, the GeForce 9400M a whole day before its official release (that’s what you get when you’re Apple). They say the thing is up to five times faster than the practically lethargic Intel GMA3100 included in the old models. The MacBook Pro also contains the 9400M, which is a nice addition, but hardly worthy of being the GPU of a Pro notebook on its own. To fulfill that role, they’ve included the higher-end GeForce 9600M GT*.

The Unused GPU

Having a nice, fast GPU is all well and good if you’re playing games, but the vast majority of MacBook Pro users’ work doesn’t use the GPU hardly at all.

Even worse, the unibody MacBook Pros can only use one GPU at a time, regardless of what you’re doing with it, and requires a fair bit of sacrifice to switch between them. Perhaps you don’t mind having to log out to switch GPUs, but it doesn’t really demonstrate the seamlessness that Apple seems to aim for. I fully expect this to change in a future Leopard software update, however.

As great as such an update would be, it still would only allow you the use of one GPU. The really impressive thing will be when Apple allows you use of both GPUs at once in some fashion of Hybrid-SLI. While there’s always the chance that this will be enabled in Leopard, I don’t have much hope of this happening before the release of Snow Leopard next year.

I say this for a couple of reasons. Number one, I’m guessing it requires a rather extensive overhaul of Apple’s window manager and graphics subsystem to use two GPUs at once and actually increase performance. They’re already doing extensive overhauls of everything else for Snow Leopard, so that’s a great opportunity to improve this as well.

UPDATE 10/23: MacRumors claims to have received information from NVIDIA confirming that the MacBook Pros are capable of doing this (a feature they call GeForce Boost). They also confirm that the machines are capable of switching between on-the-fly, which, as they say, should not be surprising since the same functionality is available under Windows. I have absolutely no doubts at this point that both of these features will be available by the time Snow Leopard rolls around.

OpenCL, Grand Central, and the GPU

Number two, and most importantly, Snow Leopard includes a technology called OpenCL, which (theoretically) allows developers and OS X itself to offload queued processing to the GPU. GPUs tend to be significantly faster than CPUs for a relatively select group of tasks, but these tasks should see gargantuan performance leaps when running under Snow Leopard.

With OpenCL offloading processing tasks to the GPU, a lot of possibilities start opening up. Apple’s also pitching a Snow Leopard technology called Grand Central, which chops up OS X’s own processing tasks for running on multiple cores, and also has provisions for allowing developers to access the same power.

Combine OpenCL and Grand Central into some multicore-GPU-supporting technology, and suddenly Snow Leopard has one more processing unit to work with. Granted, this new core may not be as fast as the CPU for some tasks, but is also potentially much faster than the CPU for others.

There was a lot of negative commentary on AMD’s decision to produce triple-core processors; even I thought it was a rather counter-productive strategy. But come Snow Leopard in 2009, Apple will be enabling a third core on a whole lot of its Macs (pre-October-2008 non-Pro MacBooks excepted).

The MacBook Pro is Apple’s first Mac with two GPUs, and will give OpenCL twice as many processing units to work with. This gives a total of — count them: two cores in the Core 2 Duo, one more in the NVIDIA 9400M, and yet another in the 9600M GT. Four processing cores in Apple’s current-generation notebooks.

Granted, the extra two may not be very useful in every situation. But neither GPU is a slouch, and either will provide huge benefits in a lot of graphically-related situations. Generally speaking, perhaps technically speaking too, and for all practical purposes, the Late 2008 MacBook Pro has four cores. Apple’s first quad-core Mac notebook.

* Widely accused of being a repackaged 8600M GT, Notebookcheck benchmarks claim the 9600M GT is 50% faster than the last-generation 8600M GTs on 3DMark06 and 43% faster on 3DMark05. It also includes new technologies like PureVideo HD (that Apple may or may not be taking advantage of) and is manufactured wth a 65nm process, compared to the 80nm process of the 8600M GT. I don’t know much about GPU benchmarks, but that seems significant enough to me.