At a conference last weekend for developers of iPad news apps, organizer Burt Herman posed an unexpected question: “How can we make news more like finger-painting?” he asked. He was responding to a point made by Jennifer Bove of Kicker Studio, a product-design firm. She had just pointed out how satisfying it is to manipulate media on the iPad, comparing it to painting. “It’s as close as we can get to a tangible experience in a digital world,” she said.
The lead-in on this article is the nugget, a mind-kick outside the box. The rest of the piece is not so helpful. The sample news apps with which the group comes up fail to thrill. They smack of the typical product of journalism experts who think everyone else thinks or should think like them about news. Beyond the “finger-painting” metaphor, the other on-target point is that we need much more research and experimentation in how real people use news.