Newspaper is the letter Cinema
Patrick Soon-Shiong earns his money with biotechnology. Now he has bought "Los Angeles Times" and "Chicago Tribune". He wants to experiment. So to see with a camera into the leaf readers.
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At billionaires who buy into the media industry, there is recently no lack Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar founded by investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald research platform "the intercept," Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took over the "Washington Post" and Alibaba- Boss Jack Ma bought the Hong Kong newspaper "South China Morning post". Patrick Soon-Shiong but had no one on the bill. The biotech entrepreneur has acquired for $ 70.5 million 12.5 percent stake in the publisher Tribune Publishing, which publishes the "Los Angeles Times" and the "Chicago Tribune". The acquisition was preceded by a power struggle between the ousted Chief Publisher Jack Griffin and the major shareholder Michael Ferro. The latter threaded the deal with a Soon-Shiong.
With several pharmaceutical companies in the ethnic Chinese surgeon has built a valued from the magazine "Forbes" to nearly twelve billion dollars in assets. The ownership structure of his company are obscure, the bioinformatics start-up Nant Health received about $ 250 million of capital by the government of Kuwait. In 1993, Soon-Shiong headlines when he performed the first transplant of insulin-producing pancreatic cells in a diabetic patient. Researchers questioned the methodology in question. Since then adhered Soon-Shiong to the image of a windy gurus. His experimentation has not done any harm.
Text should be to the moving image
With the newspaper "Los Angeles Times" and "Chicago Tribune", whose conditions decline for years, the surgeon has to a certain extent before an open heart surgery. He wants to transform the newspaper into a technology hub. First, the existing since 168 years "Chicago Tribune" in "Tronc" was renamed, short for "Tribune online content". The rather odd-looking new brand name was mocked by the Twitter community. But in addition to the name change, there are also substantial changes. Tribune Publishing announced that the publisher using an artificial intelligence software would produce two thousand videos a day. Details have not been released, but Soon-Shiong said that he wanted to change with the help of a camera technology that was developing one of its biotech firms, the reading habits of newspaper customers.For example, readers could then pivot with a camera on the printed newspaper, and the photos would be turned into a video. If you zoome about an image of basketball stars Kevin Durant and Donald Trump, one could see Durant in action or Trump in a speech. "It comes to life, whatever you see in the newspaper" summarizes Soon-Shiong his idea together. "Every page, every image, every ad is more of a TV channel, which is activated by the image itself by machine vision." Artificial Intelligence is to transform paper into a personal television. This is the newspaper industry breathe new life.
That sounds like an idea completely out of the tech-savvy California. But experts experience the euphoria. Ken Doctor from the Nieman Journalism Lab reminds Soon-Shiongs plan to the bar code scanner "Cue Cat", a mouse-type device with which the user was redirected to a URL - and which has been declared the "Time Magazine" as one of the fifty worst inventions of history , Virtual reality and artificial intelligence would indeed find their way into journalism, believes Doctor, but gradually, not in leaps and bounds as Soon-Shiong now would do. Above all, the question remains unanswered, how to solve the camera technology the economic problems of newspapers. Will Soon-Shiong really revolutionize journalism or use newspapers only as a testing ground for its biotech industries?Thoughtful appear somewhat more what is being developed in South Korea. Samsung wants to bring this year smartphones and tablets with a flexible display on the market. This could pave the way for surfaces with which to read the digital versions of newspapers and can be folded, as if they were made of paper. Soon-Shiong is in direct competition to Jeff Bezos, who wants to make the "Washington Post" with dozens of data specialists and algorithmic recommendation machines fit for the digital age. By contrast, acts Soon-Shiongs projects still like a recipe from the kitchen Alchemist. The word journalism is in the press release, in which it expresses itself through its projects, by the way not before.
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Source: F.A.Z.
