MobileWebsiteWatch

The American Journalism Review reported this month that more than ever, news organizations are rushing to engage their readers on the reading device they use the most, their mobile phones.

American news companies aren’t waiting for the ultimate smart phone (one equipped with a microprocessor and storage capability) to jump into the mobile race. Consumers can use any of 500 different handheld devices and 20 different mobile Internet browsers to access breaking news from the Washington Post, New York Times, Gannett, Cox, Hearst, ESPN, CNN, Condé Nast, MSNBC, Fox Mobile, CBS Mobile and The Weather Channel, among many others. All of them are offering, at the very least, a slimmed-down mobile Web site featuring text-based news and links to stories, sports scores, restaurant and movie listings, maps and traffic alerts, celebrity gossip, tidbits like stainbuster guides, stock quotes and “dude decoders” for single women. Some sites feature simple (and very tiny) photographs, others offer mobile video, sports coverage and bilingual TV programming - all part of a wonderfully weird, not-quite-there multimedia outreach.

I think it is really relevant that this article points out something that we all know to be true about mobile internet, but that gets short play time next to glitzty talk about iPhones and new devices. What I am referring to is the purposful nature of the mobile user. People who are browsing the web on their mobile device typically know what they want: to buy a movie ticket, to read an interesting magazine article while waiting for the bus, to check the price of an item in a store against that online, etc. Mobile publishers and companies that recognize this and provide optimized versions of their websites for mobile users have not only been the most successful, but will continue to be the most successful, even as phones themselves get faster and more advanced.

Ironically, the most successful publishers of mobile content may also be the most focused - channelized, in industry jargon. Hearst, which has had a mobile presence since 1999, now boasts nine mobile sites, including m.cosmopolitan.com and m.goodhousekeeping.com, with more than 5 million page views per month. All of the mobile sites are aimed almost exclusively at women. But just targeting women in general may not be focused enough, suggests Sophia Stuart, director of mobile for Hearst Digital. “We’ve followed women around and noticed the gaps in their day,” she says. “And we’ve discovered there’s a new type of consumer, a woman who is out on the go and needs a lot of very different information to make her life easier, such as parenting information, or if she’s nursing a new baby, or wants her stainbuster’s guide - we’ve tested every single stain on every single fabric.”

Hearst compiles the information into a series of easy-to-use lists, links and databases accessible to cell phones on its magazines’ mobile sites. Instead of relying on actual articles, Hearst readers get fashion news, recipes, blog snippets and dating tips on the fly. The mobile Web sites are designed to do just a few things very well. “You need to know a hell of a lot of technology to make this seamless,” Stuart says. Hearst does technology by outsourcing to many different mobile software vendors, although its digital media group contributes wireless expertise and knowledge of content and branding.

Moreover, the sophistication level of the device does not change the psychology of the human user, in fact, quite the contrary, it only changes their expectations. As people acquire that new phone with high speed data services, they expect seamless and focused content that can only be delivered by finding the right mobile partner with expertise required to deliver that optimized experience in a seamless fashion to whatever device this new class of consumers has while on the go.