It's just one revolutionary interface after another......
When last we looked in on the Internet-era magazine Fast Company, it was 2005 and the Gruner + Jahr division of Bertelsmann was unloading it. And we do mean “unload”: According to the New York Times archives, Chicago’s own Joe Mansueto (Morningstar Inc.) picked up both Fast Company and Inc. for $35 million, leaving G+J with a return of -93% on the $571 million it spent to buy them (from separate owners).
There’s quite a bit more to say about the old Fast Company, but today I’m focusing on the new one because my fellow North Park University trustee Chuck Eklund (@ChazEk on Twitter, if you’re scoring at home) pointed me to this piece:
With newspapers’ traditional business model in free fall, the top media minds at global design firm IDEO (designer of the Apple mouse, consultant to Fortune 500 companies) were asked to imagine: How will we get our news after the traditional model falls apart? Here’s their answer.
via News Flash From the Future: What Will Journalism Look Like? | Fast Company.
Some of what you’ll find at the link are paragraphs that exist largely to live next to the eye-catching art from IDEO (“The next four pages showcase two environments that put the future of news in the context of our daily lives,” says the text cheerfully). Others of its assertions seem just flat wrong already. But more than a few of the ideas are more than pie in the sky; they’re actually news flashes from … the present.