Hearst Magazines is launching an “App Lab” at its New York offices, which, according to paidContent, will act as an an incubator space for the company’s marketers and ad agency workers before being opened up to customers to promote Hearst’s iPhone, iPad and tablet products.
The publisher offers 22 apps so far and has all of its magazines available as digital replicas through the e-edition service Zinio says the report.
Writing on the Online Journalism Blog, Paul Bradshaw shares key points from the internet section of Ofcom’s latest report on The Communications Market 2010, analysing the implications of each for online publishers.
1: Mobile is genuinely significant: 23 per cent of UK users now access the web on mobile phones (but 27 per cent still have no access to the web on any device).
Implication: We should be thinking about mobile as another medium, with different generic qualities to print, broadcast or web, and different consumption and distribution patterns.
Continuing the debate over how Google and online news publishers can, or can’t, work together in the future, Editors Weblog has a short article based on an interview between Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt and the Wall Street Journal.
The overall message is that the future of digital news will lie in using advertising to “tell people what they should be doing” and capitalising on the movement of news searches to other platforms – namely mobile.
Once again, Schmidt promises newspapers a profitable place in Google’s future. “The only way the problem [of insufficient revenue for news gathering] is going to be solved is by increasing monetisation, and the only way I know of to increase monetisation is through targeted ads. That’s our business.” Newspapers have always answered questions that people were not aware they had to ask, and they simply have to continue doing this to fit in.
A new US-based digital magazine will feature the work of freelance journalists in mini-editions, produced and designed for mobile phones, reports the New York Times.
Subscribers to Nomad Editions, produced by a startup company of the same name, will receive a weekly edition focused on their area of interest and delivered via a mobile application. Each issue will take between 20 and 30 minutes to read. Writers will earn up to 30 per cent of revenue subscription from each edition with different shares for editors.
A niche, mobile, and freelance model? A new launch worth watching when it goes live in October.
According to a report in the Financial Times, News Corporation is “nearing a decision” on plans to start a news organisation which could provide content specifically for tablet device applications.
The plans, which could still be dropped, would mean the creation of a “tablet-centric” subscription product, for devices such as the iPad, with dedicated content produced for that platform.
The ambitious undertaking under consideration would be another test of consumers’ appetite to pay for news. The momentum behind developing a tablet-centric product is driven by a belief that readers are willing to pay for portability. News Corp’s early progress in selling subscriptions on the iPad has inspired the company to consider the new business.
The report adds that if the project goes ahead, it would mean job opportunities for new staff who would have to produce new content on news, entertainment, sports and politics.
See the full report at this link… (note: registration required)
Journalists from across all media platforms came together at the Frontline Club last night to discuss the impact of mobile on the newsroom and the wider media world.
“Mobile is as different to online as television is to radio,” CNN’s vice-president of mobile Louis Gump told the Frontline audience.
In the beginning people took someone who was sitting in the radio studio and put a camera on it. Then realised they didn’t have to do it that way. I think that’s what happening now.
He told Journalism.co.uk that the near future of mobile content needs to look at original content, rather than just using it as a new platform for existing material.
The biggest change I think will happen at CNN over the next two years is we are going to start creating content just for mobile devices. Right now most of what you see on a mobile from CNN you can also find on other platforms, but we will have more original programming.
The panel debate covered most of the ongoing issues surrounding mobile journalism, from the role a device plays in the image of a journalist to the debate over how such content should be used by ‘professional’ video journalists. Andy Dickinson, course leader of BA Digital Journalism Production at University of Central Lancashire, said it was a “mistake” to expect large news organisations to adopt the same production processes as smaller outlets.
I think it is a mistake to always be talking about what’s happening outside mainstream media, it won’t work for us. We can’t do it because of our agenda and personal and professional things get in the way of that. Now and then our big spotlight will land on it. But citizen journalism is not there to replace, it’s there to amplify.
Gump agreed, saying that the rise of citizen journalism “increases the value” of professional journalists, by “filling in the gaps”, but would not be a replacement: “We are still telling the hard news, [citizen journalism] enriches the overall offering”. Alex Wood, freelance mobile journalist and co-founder of Not on the Wires, added that mobiles were simply another platform to leverage the story. But he said in his own work, such as when he organised mass coverage of the G20 summit by mobile phones, the journalistic talent still had to shine through.
I always try to keep the integrity of the story and still worked very hard to make it journalistic. People tend to obsess about technology being one thing after another. Why not use your mobile phone to do your vox pops. There’s nothing wrong with you then putting that into a more traditional package. It’s another tool in the ever expanding toolkit that journalists have now. We can still take things from broadcast, for example framing a good shot and having good audio. Let’s go back to the basics but use them in the new technology.
He added that as a journalist using user generated content, old rules of fact-checking must still apply.
People can manipulate technology very easily and its still a worry. Journalists still need to pick up the phone and speak to the person if they have submitted media. We should always keep to those standards.
Jonathan Hewett, director of the newspaper journalism course at City University, agreed: “We are not going to chuck out the old stuff and forget the valuable lessons”. Prompting Dickinson to respond: “There’s a killer app on your phone that will allow you to check if something is right. It’s called your phone.”
Hewett said mobile has created opportunities for newspapers who do not have the visual reputation of a broadcaster, but more needs to be done.
Newspapers have been slower to catch up with more innovative stuff, but they are getting to realise mobile reporting is one way where a newspaper website can be different. It isn’t too fussed about quality of footage (…) We are still at early stage with mobiles full stop. We need to keep throwing spaghetti at the wall.
Wood commented near the end of the panel debate that he wanted to see more innovation from iPad apps, which he claimed had so far been “disappointing”, telling Journalism.co.uk to expect to see some exciting stuff from him in the near future.
CNN also announced the launch of a new international iPhone app featuring their iReport platform at the event. See our report here, and catch up with tweets from the event with the #cnnfrontline hashtag.
From last week, but well worth a read – Forbes’ columnist Trevor Butterworth on the opportunities for news groups and journalism provided by “the fifth wave of computing”: “the massive ramping up of the mobile internet and the evolution of mobile phones into ‘life devices’ through 3G, cloud computing, GPS and second generation barcoding”.
Newspapers and magazines with luxury goods supplements and sections could be the testing ground for a new kind of advertising built on mobile interactivity (…) All of this technology exists – mobile devices with sufficient camera resolution to scan barcodes have been shipping for the past year -and these capabilities appear to augur well for service and local journalism, upon which hard news will need to collaborate if not piggyback.
But the real challenge in taking advantage of this new wave is whether news organisations can work together and stop thinking of themselves as “insular, completely self-sufficient” operations with full control over their distribution, says Butterworth. It is this “bold thinking” that will master the mobile world, he says.
Tom Hulme, a design director at IDEO who helped create and launch the CelebAround iPhone application, explains the process and planning that went into the app.
This is a great post, because it considers the process as a whole: from researching the app market to pricing models and Apple’s role in the proceedings.
I can’t help thinking that Apple will have to open up and that the store is going to be used more and more as free distribution. In the future relatively few app’s will be paid for, and those that are will often use the emerging subscription model so that they can offer trials for free (lowering the barrier to adoption). Media and gaming companies are already using apps as wrappers for their existing content and offering additional features – they will give away apps and then monetise the content subsequently. Apps are likely to be portals in the future.
There are still so many uncertainties in the media landscape. Media fortunes fluctuate upwards due to the green shoots of cyclical recovery and downwards thanks to the continued – and permanent – failure of long-standing print-based publishing models.
But one thing you can be assured of is that in boardroom and management meetings across the worlds of newspapers, magazines and broadcast media, executives are being asked: “What’s our app strategy?”
Still regarded as something of a secret sauce for newspapers and magazines – Rupert Murdoch believes that all media will find its way to the iPad – the very success and survival of newspapers and magazines apparently relies on us iPhone- and iPad-wielding middle class types going on an App Store shopping spree.
I’ve written on these pages before that, much like an English goalkeeper facing a German penalty, the iPad won’t save anything at all – least of all the news business. Analysts at paidContent:UK and Journalism.co.uk agree.
So here’s another thought: despite their convenience, apps are a limited way of publishing information. The self-constructed, community-based, open, Google-able news eco-system gives the serious media consumer a better all-round experience than the closed off system represented by the iPad and App Store, and all it takes is a little effort to make the most of it.
Most apps available now are primitive, quickly-built bits of smartphone software that publish articles via sequential updates. In the main, even market-leading apps don’t begin to present stories, pictures, video and graphics to readers in the way they should.
The experience of using the Guardian and Telegraph apps is only fractionally as rewarding and revealing as using Guardian.co.uk and Telegraph.co.uk – indeed, it’s probably not even as good as those unprofitable paper things. Andrew Sparrow may be the king of political liveblogging, but try reading him on the iPhone app – it’s confusing, jumbled, the links aren’t live and it’s not worth the effort.
Look at Journalism.co.uk’s review of iPhone apps from March: out of 34 leading apps, a measly five allowed offline reading.
Since the advent of the iPhone I’ve fallen back in love with RSS. With Google Reader’s mobile version (when in internet range) I can quickly read the 1,000+ feeds I check regularly. When out of range and on the London Underground I use the free NetNewsWire app which syncs seamlessly with Google Reader and works offline beautifully, as does the paid-for Byline app which shows pictures well and partially downloads online-only content too.
But both of those RSS aggregator apps allow me to add articles to my shared items on Google Reader and post things to Twitter. It’s a real-time news diet chosen by me and the community I belong to.
Times Newspapers launched its paid-for products this week and the £2-a-week sites are soon to be tied to access to iPhone/iPad apps, much like the FT’s app. With Times executives openly predicting reader numbers to collapse by as much as 90 percent, News International may be relying on the attractiveness of the iPad apps to shore up subscription numbers. I’ve seen the TheTimes.co.uk app in action on an iPad recently – it’s essentially the day’s online and print news digested into a series of regular “editions” – and the ‘liveness’ possible from online news appears to be lacking, as is the sharing aspect.
Of course, the everyday Man On The Clapham Omnibus doesn’t care or want to know about RSS, much less mobile apps that create a mobile version of their OPML file. But Journalism.co.uk readers are media professionals – and I’d wager that most of you are capable of using free or cheap software to create a mobile news experience that no branded premium app can match.
We reported last week that the FT’s new app for iPad was on the brink of launch. Well, now it has got final Apple approval and the Hublot sponsored-app is available to download for free in the iTunes App store or via the iPad app store – although users will need to register or subscribe to one of its tiered options, for varying levels of access.
[Journalism.co.uk report ahead of launch at this link]
Here’s the FT’s own blurb, released today:
Key features of the app include the ability to:
- Download the daily FT to your iPad for offline reading
- Access content across all sections of FT.com, fully customisable so users can order key sections of the application interface – including World, Companies, Markets and more
- View the FT’s award-winning high quality video content, including the latest updates on markets and interviews with high profile CEOs each morning. This is the first time the FT has offered video on one of its mobile products.
- A dedicated Markets Data section, including macromaps highlighting markets across the world, with the option to also view regional indices and company information sheets
- Full access to view personal investment portfolios
- Read top ‘must read’ stories of the moment for the iPad edition, determined by the FT editorial team