Student journalist/entrepreneurs suggest mobile strategies for non-profit news online

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.

Last week and today, the teams have been presenting a summary of their recommendations here on OJR: Part I Part I, Part II

Kevin Dugan, who recently earned an MBA from the USC Marshall School of Business, was part of a team of AMVmobile fellowship students tasked with devising mobile strategies for KPCC Southern California Public Radio. Other students on this team: Ashley Ahearn and Keaton Gray (both of the USC Annenberg School of Journalism), and Taran Raj (USC Viterbi school of engineering).

Southern California Public Radio faces a unique set of challenges; similar, but slightly different from the usual variety said to be plaguing the news industry. While multiple revenue streams exist for the three-station, non-profit entity (KPCC, KUOR and KPCV), the ability to appropriately balance these sources of support remains paramount to the positive perception by its members and listeners and, ultimately, the forecasted growth and impact of its news coverage.

The listener base, while fiercely loyal, can be fickle about the delivery of its local news and the manner in which support is presented. We approached our recommendations to SPCR through the lens of this existing customer base, while keeping a strategic eye on the largely untapped potential of a more diverse audience.

SCPR pays for access to news content provided by National Public Radio, enabling its member stations to provide NPR content on any platform, whether via radio, online or a mobile device. NPR offers its own online version of content, as well iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry mobile applications.

But, as a local provider of Southern California news, SCPR realizes that a more regionally-focused delivery of news should be made available to its readers and listeners on mobile devices.

SCPR’s current online news offering is to be commended, with a robust slate of content and a strategic design. KPCC, SCPR’s flagship station, does have an iPhone application which streams the radio programming live, but the digital team recognizes a broader mobile platform strategy is necessary. Enter the AMV Mobile News team.

We met with Alex Schaffert, Director of Digital Media, Jason Georges, Senior Digital Producer, and Jeff Long, Web Developer, to better understand what specific needs we might address. In addition, we met with SCPR President Bill Davis, Newsroom Manager Paul Glickman, and Director of Annual Giving Stephanie Patterson. Based on these interactions and our industry research we developed a series of recommendations that we felt would position SCPR well for the next several years in mobile news.

While smart phones, with their healthy slate of features and developer-friendly APIs, have created a new genre of content consumption and shown impressive mobile subscriber adoption rates, the majority of the installed mobile customer base owns feature phones. We have all owned these phones: they often do not possess QWERTY keyboards, attractive applications or the computing speed found in smart phones (think clamshell design). But more than 80 percent of today’s mobile subscribers currently use feature phones, and, according to five-year forecasts by Strategy Analytics, more than half of mobile users will continue to own feature phones by 2014. These numbers necessitate a strategy to cater to feature phone users, a strategy that is best implemented through the development of a Wireless Application Protocol [WAP] site.

We created a model for a KPCC WAP site that employed best practices for such an offering. Quick information, such as weather and traffic data, was placed at the top. The most important content, headlines and small pictures of the day’s top stories were positioned front and center, hyperlinked so that readers could click through to the full story. A phone number for the live radio feed was displayed prominently for those customers who preferred the classic form of KPCC’s news delivery, but who did not want to incur exorbitant mobile data fees. Various news categories were also made available on the homepage, with a WAP site “SEARCH” option situated immediately below. Finally, navigation links such as “Back to Top” and “Return to Homepage” were placed at the bottom of each page. The “En Espanol” hyperlink enabled Spanish-speaking customers to access the news in the language they preferred.

In addition, we developed a live, functioning Android application for SCPR. Taran Raj teamed with a programming colleague from the Viterbi school to create an Android application that incorporated best practices of smart phone applications.

At the top of the homepage is the option to listen live to the radio program currently being broadcast, a stream that could play while you browse news articles. Top Stories remain front and center, with article summaries, pictures, and audio versions of the story available.

Android app

Features common to both the Android application and the WAP site were the ability to share articles through one click, on Facebook, Twitter, SMS and e-mail, an important option to promote the interactive nature of mobile news as well as user engagement.

At the heart of our recommendations for both platforms was the ability for mobile SCPR consumers to contribute through the mobile device. We concluded that the option to quickly donate through a mobile text presented an opportunity not only to engender a new type of loyalty from its existing listener base, but also to attract a more diverse subscriber base. Offering the option to text a donation of $5 or $10 would enable more unsolicited and spontaneous support. The envisioned mobile membership would drive not just more membership, but a new kind of membership.

This new mobile membership would offer mobile subscribers the chance to personalize their experience, allowing them to set preferences for news categories on their mobile SCPR Homepage. More importantly, mobile members would be alerted of nearby discounts and local deals exclusive to SCPR mobile members. This feature can be enabled by programming in the application that identifies, with permission, the geographic location of the user.
This GPS-enabled form of hyper-local advertising would be attractive to SCPR’s underwriters and the network of retailers and organizations already involved in the Friends Card program offered to SCPR members. These discount alerts could be sponsored on a CPM basis or a Cost per Action mechanism, whereby SCPR would earn a percentage of revenue actually earned by vendors through these promotions.

To summarize, SCPR can reap enduring benefits through a multi-pronged mobile news strategy that addresses the needs of the feature phone user through a custom WAP site, robust smart phone applications for the Android, iPhone, and Blackberry operating systems, and the ability to donate support through mobile devices. We believe that these initiatives will drive the diversity of SCPR’s audience, increase the level of participatory support of this broader audience, and strengthen the already-fierce member loyalty SCPR currently enjoys.

About Kevin Dugan

Kevin earned his MBA in 2010, focusing on entrepreneurship and finance. As a student at USC, he served as student body president of the full-time MBA program and on the boards of the Entrepreneur & Venture Management Association and the Business of Entertainment Association.

Prior to business school, Kevin worked for the commercial truck division of Enterprise Rent-a-Car, where he held general management responsibilities that included sales, sales management, profit/loss performance, and market share growth. He concurrently co-founded a mobile content provider that was sold to global content aggregators. He has an undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Miami.