And Now for the Mobile Revolution | Content and Context

Yikes!  As if newspaper publishers didn’t have enough trouble, Clyde Bentley—citing research from technology industry analyst Gartner—warned in a Reynolds Journalism Institute blog post that they have just three years to prepare for the next big technological shift facing their industry:  Mobile devices will replace personal computers as the most common means worldwide for getting content from the Internet.  Helpfully, Bentley compiled a “hellish but doable” timeline for publishers to implement a mobile strategy in time for the change.

Yikes again! 

As it turns out, Bentley’s blog post was written in early 2010.  The PC-to-mobile-device shift will occur in 2013, according to Gartner.  By now, news publishers should  have checked off about half the items on Bentley’s to-do list—including researching mobile-device preferences in their markets; issuing smartphones to editors; designating editors for mobile content; training news and advertising staffs on the potential for mobile content; releasing apps for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Symbian; offering mobile coupons; preparing to take news from the public by text, voice, and images; issuing mobile devices with video- and sound-recording capabilities to reporters; integrating mobile commerce and content; and customizing mobile websites and apps to include features such as real-time sports scores, weather, and location-based stories, ads, and video.

Are we there yet?  Certainly, many newspaper publishers have repurposed their existing online and print content for apps for the iPhone, iPad and Android devices.  (Maybe it’s no longer urgent to create apps for BlackBerry and Symbian.)  However, few publishers have found the time for numerous other items on Bentley’s to-do list—particularly those uniquely related to mobile media such as location-based news and advertising. 

Bentley also noted that this transformation is more than a shift from computers to mobile devices.  It also involves a change from computers with 17-inch displays to devices with 3-inch screens.  Apps developed for these smaller devices partly solve this problem—and have the added benefit of reinforcing readers’ brand loyalty.  However, as one commenter on Bentley’s blog post noted, many readers prefer news publishers’ full websites and take advantage of pinch-and-zoom features such as those on the iPhone’s Safari browser.  This shift may be an opportunity for news publishers to redesign cluttered, slow-to-download websites.  Cleaner, more-functional home, section, and article pages might actually be more useful both for readers who are browsing from computers with larger displays and for those using mobile devices with smaller screens. (Sept. 30 update: Check out The Boston Globe's new website for an example of presentation that adapts to the size of your screen or browser window.) Of course, that’s another task to put on the industry’s daunting to-do list.

Gartner’s 2010 forecast included other items with ramifications for the news industry.  For example, Gartner predicted that as many as 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets as soon as 2012.  This trend toward cloud computing could be an opportunity for news organizations to reduce their large information technology costs tied to legacy content management and publishing systems.  Garter also predicted that Facebook will become the hub for integration of social networking into a socialized Web.  In addition to a mobile strategy, publishers also need a social Web strategy.  By 2015, context—which involves factors such as location and social interaction—will be as important to the mobile Internet as search is to the desktop Internet, Gartner predicted.  News publishers, then, must become context providers rather than just content providers.  As Gartner warned, businesses that don’t provide context “risks handing over effective customer ownership” to those that do.