Lists

Anyone who has ever seen the contents of my messenger bag or my notebook knows I’m a manic list maker. While GTD apps like Things are great for running dynamic, intricate, paperless to do lists, there’s nothing more therapeutic when I’m working on a project than writing down everything I need to do on an piece of paper, crossing them all off one-by-one then crumpling the paper up (and recycling it responsibly, obviously).

Design

My design process - for how I best get things done - always starts on paper. I typically take a sizable chunk of time at the start of planning any new design to tease ideas out on paper. Obviously most clients want to see wireframes put together and exported to pdf, but I’ve been lucky with a few smaller jobs that clients can work with me on paper and move from there straight to coding mockups.

Paperwork

Another satisfaction a lot of freelancers know is the sound of the overdue cheque busting through your letterbox and crashing to the floor. While email notifications of bank transfers and the occasional paypal (taking a percentage fail) are still pleasing, there’s nothing quite like holding the reward for weeks or months of hard work.

Letters

A dying art, but I still have a few friends who enjoy sending letters and I’m always more than happy to oblige with a reply. Emails have become entirely disposable, but letters take effort - buying nice paper, making sure you have a good pen to hand, and mentally assembling your remarks as to avoid scribbling out or starting over. Also unlike email you can attach sizable attachments into the gigabytes, so long as you’re equipped with a DVD burner.

So now that we’re well and truely buried in the age of the machine, what is it you still use paper for?

In addition to the mountain of client work I seem to have lumbered myself with over the past few weeks, I’ve somehow found time to bring the next version of goodonpaper to it’s conclusion. More of an evolution stylistically than a total overhaul, you’ll notice slightly more attention to the typography and spacing while at the same time tightening the whole site up quite considerably - and adding a few new features.

Based upon my previous ability to post both entries and reviews, the site now takes a more blatant “tumblelog” approach to categorizing different content with the addition of individually styled photo, video and audio entries (something you’ll notice as I actually start posting). I also now have the ability to break away from “casual” posting and file articles - which will include features and guides that may change over time (eg. the already popular guide to free wifi in Belfast) - again, going live as soon as I get the chance to polish up some older content and finish off articles I’m putting together at the moment.

You may also spot a few of the more minor improvements - I now have a bonafide RSS button in the header for those without browser auto-detection (durrr for not including this in the last version), the sidebar is now a more blatant integration of content from external sites and the comments system has been tidied up and styled a little neater.

It’s still a few tweaks away from being fully complete - obviously a lot of bugs are going to come out of the woodwork now its properly live - so if you spot anything, please do drop me an email or leave a comment in a recent post. Otherwise, I hope you like it!

Over the past few days, the future of journalism has been the topic of discussion of both a panel at the WaterFront Hall (part of Trans, naturally) and a couple of interesting articles I’ve coincidentally stumbled across. Oddly, from spending almost three years of my life on a path to a career in the media (running a local station, producing and co-presenting a podcast, blogging etc), it’s something I write about very little - so I intend to lay the groundwork with my opinion on the future of journalism and develop from there.

The future of journalism is already among us, or at least the principles are. The journalistic mediums of the future are on-demand, interactive, and personalizable - and thereby inherently digital. Journalistic mediums of the past - ie. newspapers, radio and television - existed as three separate mediums requiring three separate “hardware” investments (however temporary) for consumption, were typically a one-way conversation and allowed little to no immediate feedback or correspondence.

Obviously this transition is already taking place with the increasingly popularity of “online” newspapers (particularly the big nationals), who now syndicate much of their print content to allow for interactivity, as well as relevant additional content in the form of journalist/topic specific blogs, podcasts and streamable video. But it is not the content or distribution that will define the future of journalism - given its comparative ease in publishing compared to print - but rather, how the previously established models will evolve to self-finance as the security of print advertising revenue is removed and online journalism is forced to go it alone.

Pretty much everyone in the media is aware of the graph I’m going to delineate. Currently, print advertising income is falling and online advertising income is rising. Beyond today, no one really knows if this trend is going to continue, but what we can be relatively sure of is that the lines will not eventually cross at break-even for many newspapers - which will leave many severely crippled or even off the radar entirely. The hope is in the eventual security of switching to predominantly online distribution - which should severely cut costs and leaves groups in an excellent position to widen distribution with comparatively less marketing effort - the only problem being that the model or means for independently financing this has yet to be imagined.

“I do think, though, that a bunch of smart people could make a lot of headway in discussing the survival of journalism if they could only leap over these 10 points — leave them at the door, place them off-limits — and get on with a fruitful discussion of how to generate revenues to support the work that must continue.”

The first person to come up with a successful, profitable execution of these ideas will have something very, very interesting on their hands.

What are your thoughts? How do you think you’ll be consuming media in 10 years time?

II. Arts & Culture

Rock Band - Virtual Battle of the Bands
22nd July, 9.30pm, £5 (info)
Exactly what this game was created for - teams compete in a virtual battle of the bands to win some stupidly awesome prices - including Xbox 360 systems and copies of the (gaspingly overpriced) game. Apparently the tournament is also to include the original Guitar Hero games and a few from the Singstar series - expect to see me belting out something on Easy Mode at least once over the course of the evening.

One Man Star Wars
28th July, 8pm, £12 (info)
Canadian actor Charles Ross takes to the Waterfront Studio to solitarily act out the initial (read: only) Star Wars films - single-handedly playing all the characters, singing all the music, fighting all the battles - and condensing the entire trilogy into a single sitting. Pleasantly rescheduled out of the way of last weeks’ TwoStep - can’t wait!

Urban Market
26th July, All Day, Free (info)
The Urban Market extends the usual Saturday morning St. George’s Market to local artists, designers, musicians, photographers, puppeteers, jewellery makers, record labels as the “alternative” side of Belfast take hold for the day. Always worth a look!

Transcend Exhibition
26th July, 4pm, Free (info)
The exhibition - taking place in the Waterfront Foyer right after the Urban Market - places some of the finest work from internationally renowned graphic artists on display in the form of screenprints, paintings, skate decks, customized vinyl toys and video projections.

Transcend Live-Drawing
26th July, 6pm, Free (info)
Leading in from the exhibition opening, many of the artists on display who have travelled over for the launch will take to every surface in sight with sharpies, stencils and spray-paint - covering walls and windows with a blend of graphic brilliance. The amount of wall space we’ve managed to commission is nothing short of staggering - come watch these guys fill it!

SweetTalk
26th July, 8.30pm, £7 (info)
The evening then concludes with SweetTalk - a series of presentations from some leading national creative talents - including Gavin Strange, BrenB, Chris Judge, M&E (Matthew and Emelie) and Aidan Kelly. Expect overflowing amazement and inspiration.