Look, there’s been some reasonably good news for newspaper companies lately, at least on the circulation side. They are indeed turning to paywalls in ever-greater numbers, and we think that’s a good thing, and that the arguments against them are mostly faith-based.
Digital subscription rates are rising, as Press Plus has documented among its clients:
But that doesn’t help much if companies can’t offer their product on devices that readers are turning to.
The fact is, mobile is the opportunity that papers have been waiting for. The PC—the bolt-upright, lean-forward experience—was never a good technology for journalism and was always going to be transitional. And laptops are only slightly better. The industry has waited a long time for something better to come along.
Now it has. Time to get cracking.
It’s true that newspaper companies have a much bigger job than startups—to transform what are essentially industrial operations into technology companies. And it’s easy to pick on them.
On the other hand, they have zero choice in the matter.
Good article. And it made me think of my own tablet experience in relation to news sites. I have always been a news junkie and since getting an iPad almost three years ago, I find my main Mac being used solely for work while the iPad mini is the device for reading news and magazine sites.
But I am generally turned off by both the appearance and user experience on mobile sites and I invariably use the desktop versions. This even applies to my two favourites, sites, The NYT and The Guardian.
My preference may be because the traditional desktop sites more closely duplicated a print newspaper, even though I rarely read on paper any more (except for books, always books).
#1 Posted by Mark Kiemele, CJR on Sat 4 May 2013 at 02:01 AM
It appears that this article lumps publishers who *natively* build flexible, mobile- and tablet-friendly sites via HTML5 into the same category as those that utterly ignore mobile. That's like saying that my tablet is antiquated because it doesn't have a modem and goshdarnit, in this age of pipes and tubes, you need a goshdarn modem, because I hear it gets you connected to the fortunecities. Harrumpff.
Just because I didn't pay a vendor to write an app for something my flex-template site can do perfectly well does not mean I hate mobile users.
Please have someone who knows *something* about website design edit your articles before they go up. This kind of generalization on your part makes you look silly.
#2 Posted by Insider, CJR on Mon 6 May 2013 at 04:26 PM
Got a link to the Press Plus research? It's not obvious from their website where to find it.
#3 Posted by Amy Gahran, CJR on Wed 8 May 2013 at 04:02 PM