Go Mobile: Serving Youth as a Long-Term Strategy

Where will your news audience come from in five, ten, or twenty years? If your future news audience clearly prefers mobile media (and they probably do), then go mobile, you must!...

Young people are perhaps the largest demographic that’s currently under-served by news organizations. But they are perhaps the most important community to engage. For any news organization considering its long-term prospects, shifting media preferences are a crucial concern. People generally develop news and information preferences early. And in any business, it’s much easier to adapt your offerings to work with people’s evolving preferences—rather than to try to convince them that they should keep wanting whatever you’re accustomed to offering.

In our Total Community Coverage series earlier this year, we mentioned recent research from the Pew Internet and American Life project about US demographics on mobile media use. According to Pew, 75% of Americans currently own cell phones—and 31% of all US cell phone owners are aged 18-29. On a typical day, 73% of cell phone owners aged 18-29 use their phones for something other than voice calls (sending or receiving text messages, taking pictures or video, instant messaging, accessing news or information, etc.)

That Pew study only polled adults, so their data do not take teens, “tweens,” or younger children into account. However, Frank W. Baker has created an excellent roundup of current research into the media habits of children. There I found:

• Deloitte & Touche 2007 study: 84% of US “Millennials” (people aged 13-24) send and receive text messages on their cell phones, and 46% of Millennials use their cell phones as an entertainment device.
• J-Ideas 2007 study: A total of 53% of US teens currently get news online at least weekly. Furthermore, 15% of teens use mobile devices such as cell phones and PDAs to get news several times weekly.

Plus, CBS News reported in 2007 that by 2009, “over 10 million US kids will get cell phones.” Like I said: Media preferences start young!

For a potentially humbling but valuable experience, try accessing your favorite news sites (including your own) via your cell phone. If you don’t have a “smart phone” that can browse the internet, then sign up for whatever text messaging services those sites offer. Keep an eye out for these issues:

• Auto-detection of mobile device? When you accessed the site’s main URL, did it automatically serve up a mobile version of the site? This is an important part of mobile usability, since pages typically take longer to download, and since mobile users might not have time or patience to try again. For a good example of mobile auto-detection that works for almost every smart phone, check out the Houston Chronicle’s site. Just go to their regular URL, Chron.com, on your smart phone. The Fox News site also auto-detects mobile devices. The mobile version of the Drudge Report offers this list of mobile-friendly news sites.
• Special URL needed for mobile devices? Some news sites require mobile users to visit a special URL to access their mobile-friendly version. For instance, if you want to see the mobile-friendly version of ABC News, you must visit m.abcnews.com. (Except on an iPhone, which currently cannot download that site.) This is a reasonable halfway step for your mobile news audience—but it’s still a significant potential barrier. Mobile visitors who don’t already know your mobile URL will have to search for it via search engines or on your site. If your mobile site currently has a separate URL, make sure a link to your mobile site appears near the top-left corner of your regular site, for easy mobile access.
• Text messaging services. Most cell phone users don’t own smart phones—which cost much more to buy, and for the carrier contract. However, virtually every cell phone in use today can send and receive text messages. So in addition to offering a mobile-friendly version of your site, it’s a good idea to also offers free text-message alert services that mention top headlines and breaking news in a variety of categories. Well, at least “free” to subscribe—cell owners do pay for text messages they receive. That’s why it’s important to allow mobile users to customize their text alert preferences, and to never send them more than a few messages daily at most. Check out the offerings from Bakersfield.com and Reuters.

What mobile options are your favorite news sites offering—or missing? Please comment below. Need some guidance on making your site mobile-friendly? Check out the Newspaper Association of America’s new development guide for mobile sites (reviewed here by the Houston Chronicle’s online operations manager David Herrold).

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