October 05, 2010
Steve Buttry on mobile news: “Web-first means fighting the last war”
Last week, as I was writing my article about how journalism conferences should start highlighting mobile media as a top theme, exactly this kind of presentation was happening at the annual convention of the National Newspaper Association—an event that attracts primarily publishers, circulation managers, ad managers, and other top business-side executives mainly from smaller daily papers (as well as some top editors, but not really journalists). Steve Buttry (director of community engagement for TBD.com) presented a session called Be a Mobile Leader in Your Community (handout).
Here are some highlights of what he covered, and why…
By Amy Gahran
“For the last year I’ve been saying that news organizations currently have too many people trying to figure out how to be web first. That’s like fighting the last war—or at least the war from 5-10 years ago,” said Buttry. “Most news organizations already have a pretty strong web presence. So even doing an amazingly better job there won’t actually move the needle a whole lot.”
“Right now is like 1997 for mobile media,” he continued. “So far, nobody in the news business is really dominating the mobile space. For now we have a chance to carve out our mobile market. This huge business opportunity is coming fast—and if news organizations don’t see that, they’ll miss it.”
There’s a strong business incentive for local news venues to go mobile. An April Gordon Burrell Associates report predicted that “local mobile advertising hit $285 million in 2009 and is expected to double this year to $586 million, then spike upward to $4.7 billion by 2014.”
Buttry notes: “That’s comparable to the decline in print advertising in the last year.” Here’s his analysis of that report from a news industry perspective.
How news professionals can get started with mobile
If you’re in the news business but know nothing about mobile, Buttry advises that you start your learning curve with the phone you have in your pocket right now. “Use your mobile devices a lot. For instance, get a Foursquare account and start checking in to the places you go from your phone. I don’t think Foursquare is the ultimate solution for location-based communication and advertising, but it’s a leader in that field right now so that makes it a useful place to start.”
Once you’re on Foursquare and checking in to your favorite haunts, or even becoming the “mayor” of some places, Buttry said you’ll start to get ideas by seeing the information that Foursquare advertisers or other users offer about locations. “Remember, the Wall Street Journal broke the story of the Times Square bomber with a shout on Foursquare,” he said.
Buttry’s more radical suggestion to get everyone in the news organization focused on mobile is to eliminate your daily page 1 meeting—and replace it with a mobile planning meeting that involves the same key staffers.
“Your staff already knows how to put together a good page 1, and they don’t necessarily need a daily meeting to keep that process happening,” said Buttry. “But a daily meeting on mobile planning and promotion can get everyone to focus on mobile and make it a priority.”
Buttry also recommends experimenting with a one-off mobile project focused on a special event of high interest in your community.
“Whenever something is happening that lots of people in your community will be traveling to—like a bowl game, state fair, or papal visit,—support them on the road. They won’t be seeing your print edition, and their laptop is back in their hotel room. So mobile has a much greater reach. One-off projects can connect strongly with audiences and advertisers. But even if this experiment is a complete bust, don’t sweat it. It’s time limited. You’ll still learn important things that will help your ongoing mobile operations.”
From an engagement perspective, mobile is valuable as an interactive channel. He notes that TBD.com is “doing neat things with crowd maps. It’s not just delivering content on devices, but engaging with our community via mobile devices.”
For example, TBD.com allows community members to map Metro (transit) problems. “This covers stuff like busted escalators, nonfunctioning scanners, etc.,” says Buttry. “All of this content comes from people on the scene with the mobile devices. If you make that connection where they’re contributing mobile content, they’ll consume your mobile content more.”
Think beyond smartphones. So far Buttry’s interest in mobile news opportunities has mainly been focused on smartphones. However, he also recognizes the key role played by mobile web sites—which works to varying degrees on most feature phones, which still comprise the vast majority of the mobile audience in any community.
“The mobile web certainly is an advertising vehicle,” he said. He also noted that all mobile channels—including SMS text messaging, e-mail, and social media activity—can support business models that move beyond advertising into additional revenue models like local search and direct sales.
Why are most top news execs lagging on making mobile a top priority? “I think it’s a combination of the ever-present and huge demands of the legacy organization,” said Buttry. “It does take a lot of time and energy to put out the newspaper, so anything besides print is always a secondary pull on their attention. But that’s exactly why the need to go mobile first and make it a top priority.”
He also noted that most news organizations don’t have mobile developers on staff—and especially at small news outlets, they’re unlikely add this position due to resource constraints.
“That’s why you’ve got to push your local press associations,” says Buttry. “They’ve always done things that smaller members can’t do alone, like landing national advertisers. If developing mobile offerings adds value for news organizations, maybe the press association could hire a mobile developer or two.”
Slides from Buttry’s NNA 2010 presentation:
The final session of NNA 2010 also featured mobile: Community Building in a Mobile World, by Clive Bentley of the Reynolds Journalism Institute.
Journos need mobile info too.
It’s great to see such strong mobile offerings at an event geared toward business-side executives from the news industry. But still, these are skills and context that journalists and editors need too.
Mobile alters the fundamental context of news and information—which means folks on the editorial side must learn to think differently about what we cover, how we cover it, and how we engage with audiences around news. Most notably, the traditional narrative story approach doesn’t meet the needs of most mobile users.
These are core editorial considerations. As long as journalists keep cranking out mainly narrative stories that are intended primarily for print, broadcast, or a computer-based web experience, we’re missing a huge mobile opportunity.
Journalists need to learn to integrate mobile-friendly formats and engagement with narrative stories, in order to serve emerging markets effectively and create a blended (not siloed) experience that bridges different types of media.
...But even before that, journalists and editors must understand how important and fast-moving mobile media is. Urgency drives skill-building.
That’s why mobile should be a key theme not just at events for the business-side folks, but for journalists and editors too. As long as journalism event planners continue to follow the lead of journalists (who generally tend to lag on technological evolution) our whole industry will continue to lose ground.
Comments
Well said! But you know ... journalism is no longer what it once was ...
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