Comments on: Is anyone on staff actually reading the mobile version of your news website?

By: Craig Saila

Craig Saila — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:56:46 +0000

Couldn’t agree more with your article (and with some of the comments in thread)…and I work at msnbc.com.

In the past year-and-a-half or so, smart phones have rapidly changed the way people consume mobile content, and it’s essential mobile sites be treated with similar care as the primary websites.

If our technology could move as fast as our journalists do, responding to these changes wouldn’t be a problem. The frustrating reality is that technology doesn’t always work that way.

Moving away from legacy systems, for example, takes time even if the content is stored in XML (as msnbc.com’s articles are). The bigger the system is, the larger the time penalty.

All of this is a long way of saying that at msnbc.com, we’ve been working to create a better mobile for a while. And very shortly, we’ll be releasing some foundational improvements to our story pages on both the mobile and traditional web which should help escalate mobile’s status in our world.

By: 64.12.116.136

64.12.116.136 — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 12:28:53 +0000

Site managers are more concerned about the technology than journalism. They have a great handle on which button to push but not enough imagination for content. It is all about color and visuals, not prose and words.

Danny L. McDaniel
Lafayette, Indiana

By: 69.107.134.49

69.107.134.49 — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 00:29:46 +0000

It is possible to successfully deep link to mobile websites without affecting other linking conventions. But as you point out, people on staff aren’t even using their own mobile websites (and I bet even the web developers aren’t visiting their own mobile sites either).

To deep link, you could really easily add a query string to the end of the URL for mobile formatted sites. For example the link:

http://www.www.ojr.org/ojr/people/robert/201001/1815/

could have some javascript to detect that you’re on a mobile device and redirect you to the URL:

http://www.www.ojr.org/ojr/people/robert/201001/1815?mobile=true

This way, the link is preserved.

By: 166.137.138.106

166.137.138.106 — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 19:46:03 +0000

And I tried to email this excellent article, but the email link doesn’t work on a mobile.

By: Amy Gahran

Amy Gahran — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 18:21:56 +0000

Dead on, Robert!

A coupla things to add:

1) Often I hear news site managers excuse these major mobile gaffes by saying their news CMS can’t really handle mobile. Answer: Don’t use your crappy outdated print-focused CMS for mobile. Instead, pull full-content RSS feeds from your original CMS and use that to populate a more flexible CMS that can more easily create mobile friendly content.

2) Re: making links go right to pages for mobile users, not to the mobile home page: this should be a top priority. Put a programmer on it now. It’s not always trivial, but it can *always* be fixed. Mobile is a key potential ad revenue source for any news org (especially metro & local venues), but only if you don’t annoy the crap out of mobile users. By routing people to your mobile home page you force them to search for the content they thought they were getting in the first place — and searching for anything on mobile, even when site search is really good, is more of a usability hassle than from a computer. I am surprised how many news orgs consider this a low priority to fix.

- Amy Gahran