Mobile Strategy

Comment

Comment by Jonathan Groves on February 21, 2010 at 5:50am

If you need an inexpensive way to create an iPhone app for your news site, http://www.appmakr.com/ works well. We used it for an app for our social-media blog and had little problem getting it through the App Store.

Comment by Charlotte-Anne Lucas on September 24, 2009 at 4:00pm

Clyde -
I would love to get together on a call or board to talk. We're trying to make mobile filing and receiving fully accessible for community journalists with dumb phones. And geo tagging all content from GIS enabled phones ...

Comment by Clyde Bentley on September 24, 2009 at 1:59pm

I'm the RJI fellow working on mobile this year. That means I can throw resources at this group. Interested?
I'm going to the Online News Association conference Oct. 1-3, where there is a substantial mobile agenda. If anyone is interested, we could brainstorm on a conference call or via a chat board next Monday or Tuesday afternoon to see who needs what information and who has ideas we can run with.

Comment by Emily Sussman on September 23, 2009 at 2:26pm

Clyde, that infrastructure would be amazing if... or should I say when... you pull it off! Are you thinking of creating easy-to-administer (for the local news editors) "packages," whereby the editors could pick and choose from layout templates, and, for varying rates, custom wire news service feeds?

Comment by Clyde Bentley on September 11, 2009 at 8:57am

I apologize for losing track of this group. I should explain, however, that I am an RJI Fellow this year and my project is to create a mobile phone strategy for smaller newspapers. I've already conducted one survey of consumers and plan to conduct another using a national sample. I am in contact with several mobile manufacturers and service providers, but I am looking for a couple of 20,000 - 50,000 circ papers to work with. Email me direct at bentleycl@missouri.edu or text/call mobile 573 999 1580. I have a test project designed for non smartphones.

Comment by Barry Parr on June 24, 2009 at 12:38pm

I agree that you need a mechanism for detecting mobile devices so you can give them the correct home page. Talking Points Memo also does this. It's on my to-do list.

It makes sense to support phones with up to date browsers: RIM, Android, and Pre. And Nokia outside the US. Or anything else who can view a standard html/css page.

The remaining devices are the vast majority of "mobile devices", but a miniscule share of mobile pages delivered. And their share is shrinking daily.

Comment by Jane Stevens on June 24, 2009 at 12:27pm

Just checked out Coastsider.com/m. Cool!

And signed up via iPhone.

Comment by Jane Stevens on June 24, 2009 at 12:19pm

Barry, we just had a long discussion here at LJWorld yesterday about dealing with mobiles other than iPhone, which most of our community uses. Another issue was setting up a way so that a cell phone user always goes to the mobile version of a site first, with an option to go to the main site. Or, as HuffPost does, provides info about their app. That seems especially important as news & info are integrated into social networking.

Comment by Barry Parr on June 24, 2009 at 11:26am

I just set up a mobile version of Coastsider:

http://coastsider.com/m

It took me just a couple of hours, thanks to the flexibility of my CMS, which is expression engine.

It needs a little work, but I was happily surprised by how easy it was.

I've optimized it for iPhone, but it should work on any decent mobile browser. Because I want to reproduce the look of my main site and don't have a lot of development resources, I've decided that it's not worth it to create a site for browsers that don't support css, let alone those that require WAP.

I'm willing to wait for the mobile market to come to me.

Comment by RJI Mobile Group Leader on June 17, 2009 at 10:17am

Want to suggest a topic to discuss here? Leave a comment on the wall and I'll upgrade it to a blog post. Thanks!