OJR: The Online Journalism Review

Rebecca Lett

Los Angeles,

Homepage: http://www.amvmobile.org/rebecca-lett.html

Rebecca is a junior double-majoring in print journalism and economics. Journalism has been one of her many passions since she was in the eighth grade, and she sees the changing field of journalism today as very exciting.

She writes for the lifestyle section of the Daily Trojan, and is also an active member of her sorority, Pi Beta Phi. She loves to read, run, write, take pictures, learn and use her imagination.

Contact:

Articles:

These articles are the work of their author, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of nor an assignment by OJR.

Student journalist/entrepreneurs look at mobile tablet strategies for newspapers

June 8, 2010
Editor's note: In the Annenberg-Marshall-Viterbi News Entrepreneur Fellowship Program students from three USC colleges collaborated to invent the future of news. Last month, three teams (each including students from USC Annenberg School of Journalism, USC Marshall School of Business, and USC Viterbi School of Engineering) devised and pitched economically viable mobile news ideas to executives from Los Angeles-area news organizations.
This week and next, the teams will present a summary of their recommendations here on OJR.

USC Annenberg journalism student Rebecca Lett was part of a team of AMVmobile fellowship students tasked with devising mobile tablet strategies for the Orange County Register. Other students on this team: Kevin Lu (USC Annenberg), Drew Prickett (USC Marshall school of business), and Saravanan Rangaraju (USC Viterbi school of engineering).

The Orange County Register hadn't foreseen the downfall of print journalism with the rise of the Internet. Ian Hamilton, the Register's technology reporter, Sonya Smith, social and mobile leader, and Claus Enevoldsen, director of interactive marketing, had anxiously explained the Register's position as a print news organization in hopes that we, two Annenberg students, one Marshall student and one Viterbi student, could develop a new strategy that potentially could save their business.

We put ourselves in their shoes. Print journalism, the path they had passionately chosen for themselves years ago, would never be the primary source of news again. Online publications, being free with cheap advertising, could not become a substantial source of revenue as they are.

After a decade of canceled print subscriptions in favor of reading more up to date content for free on the Internet, would people be willing to pay for online content? And more specifically, would people pay for mobile news applications on their phones and tablets (e.g. the iPad)?

In our presentation, we reconfirmed what the Register had been silently telling themselves all along - mobile is here to stay. We encouraged the Register to be early adopters and to incorporate advanced tablet strategy into their working mobile strategy. More...

No comments | Archive Link