Three months ago, I wrote from the newspaper publishers' and editors' convention in Washington, D.C., that the sunrise market of
serving news to mobile devices was getting the most attention as a promising business model.
The buzz has been sounding more like a NASCAR track lately. But if you'll pardon the metaphor, I think the finishing line of a working business model for a typical metro or local paper is still a long way off.
This week alone brought:
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A
solid takeout in AJR on mobile's prospects. Author Arielle Emmett does an especially nice job explaining why a successful news product is considerably more complicated than a scaled-back version of the established Web site. She also captures the rich mix of vendors and build-it-in-house strategies developing quickly to serve news and ads to mobile.
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The New York Times profiled one of those start-ups, Verve Wireless (run by my old
Philadelphia Inquirer colleague Art Howe). It has a robust client list of 4,000 publications and 140 publishers already and $3 million of second-round venture capital support led by the Associated Press. In an echo of the much-discussed Yahoo partnership for selling national ads online, newspapers are willing to give away a portion (unspecified) of the ad revenue for technology and other support of the business that would be slow and expensive to invent.
- This week's "Talk to the Times" online feature spotlights the paper's chief technology officer for digital operations, Marc Frons. Mobile is part of the Q&A discussion, but in the broader context of the Times' sprint to offer its content in all manner of formats, even to relatively small groups of customers (like those who pay 75 cents to download a text-only version of the day's paper into their Kindle).
I won't try to rehash further the rich material in all three pieces, but a couple of reflections.
For mobile to come together as a business, it needs to grow: the quality and affordability of the devices, the audience for an assortment of news and information products, appealing medium-specific formatting and, finally, monetization through ads or another revenue stream.
Right now the expected boom in devices, led by the new iteration of the iPhone introduced in July, is taking place. The quality of local news offerings is spotty from pretty good to primitive (hard to navigate and to read) but targeted for improvement. The advertising stream is mostly hypothetical and does not necessarily belong to news organizations; In fact Google and other localized search services may have a head start and the lion's share of what is there so far.
But as one analyst told the Times, mobile is a big enough potential business that newspapers cannot afford not to be in the fray.
It also occurs to me that as pleased buyers unwrap their new iPhones and Kindles (or crank up BlackBerries and Treos) they find high-quality news products from The New York Times and other national players like The Washington Post, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal. They are not particularly in need of national and international headlines from their hometown paper and may or may not be able to access a well-formatted local report.
So is this one more arena where the big guys have the edge and are draining news audience and advertising business away from distressed metros?
