I found out checking my Twitter feed on my iPhone. I suspect that many people first heard the same way, though tweets, mobile alerts, text messages and Facebook posts. The news was 15 minutes old on Twitter before I saw the first TV network break in to report that President Obama was about to make a statement, then soon after confirming that bin Laden, the man behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks, was dead.

(And if you’d really been paying attention, you might have read earlier in the day this Twitter user live-blogging the attack in Pakistan that killed bin Laden.)

I hadn’t planned, obviously, to write about bin Laden for today. (Nor had any of the journalists around the world who were tearing up old budgets and remaking their pages late last night.) But I had planned to write what I fear will become a recurring nag to online journalists to pay closer attention to how their work comes across on mobile devices.

Given how I – and millions others, I suspect – first heard the news last night, that advice seems all the more relevant to me now. So now we join our regularly scheduled post. Mobile must not be left an afterthought in a news organization; it must become the first thought. It’s the first thought already for our audience – the way that more and more people are first hearing about breaking news, or even non-breaking viral news, online.

And yet, news organizations continue to make the mistakes I complained about last year, and the year before that.

If there’s one item of advice I wish that all news organizations would be embrace, it would be this: Please, if you tweet a link to a story on your website, and I click that link on my mobile device, do not then redirect me to your mobile home page, instead of sending me to the article you tweeted.

Home page redirection is the lazy programmer’s way of ensuring that mobile users see your optimized site. Stop it, please. Stop it now. Any programmer worth employing ought to be able to create a device-sniffing script that redirects readers to the mobile version of the specific article instead.

Beyond that, most of the frustrations I have as a mobile user stem from an apparent belief in some news organizations that “mobile = text.” While I encourage news organizations to remember the millions of would-be readers out there with feature phones, we’re long past the era when anyone could assume that “mobile = ” any one thing. Mobile’s as diverse as the Internet itself now, and designers and editors must be ready to craft presentations that meet individual readers’ needs, regardless of the device that they are using.

With no visuals available as the news broke, the bin Laden story could be told to mobile users using nothing but text. (That lack of visuals put television at a disadvantage as it waited nearly an hour for the President to speak Sunday night. My children started timing the loop of stock bin Laden footage one network played in between its various talking heads.)

That’s hardly the case with all news stories of course. Consider Friday’s royal wedding in England. And before anyone sneers that the wedding wasn’t ‘news,’ lemme say that if a billion people around the world are watching a live event at the same time, that event is worth covering. Just put the event in appropriate context – in this case, as a cultural celebration that will might end up having a significant effect on the global fashion industry, the wedding industry and the tourism industry. And that millions of people around the world enjoyed as at an excuse for some fun parties.

That now said, if you’re going to tweet a story about a photo of someone’s dress, and I get a mobile version of that story, the story better include the photo of the dress. Yet many websites, as a formatting matter, automatically strip photos and video embeds from their mobile stories.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter wether the photo is of an evening gown or a battle scene, images are a part of journalism and ought to be a part of journalism on the mobile Web, as well. Even the cheapest feature phones today have the ability to show a photo. Employ smart programming that gives your editors the ability to deliver newsworthy photos to feature phone users, more liberal use of photos to smart phone users and photo-rich displays to tablet users.

At the same time, let’s also use the need to better optimize the news reading experience for mobile users as an excuse to kill some of the bad design habits that have infected some news organizations. My current pet peeve is stories that present lists as multi-page galleries when the items in the lists don’t need a visual presentation.

Galleries for a list of the top 10 news photos of year use that format well. Galleries of the 10 most useless college majors, not so much.

It’s annoying enough to click through all those panels (with the interstitial ads) on a laptop Web browser. Try doing it on a phone. Yuck.

Let’s fess up. Those types of presentations are designed more to pad page views and ad impressions than to effectively communicate information to an audience. That’s not journalism. It’s spamming.

I asked on my personal Twitter feed if anyone knew of an ombudsman or readers’ rep who had addressed online design issues in defense of readers’ interests. I didn’t get any responses. If you have a link to one such piece, send it my way, or drop it into the comments.

Let’s quit hiding behind the excuse that we need to make money with our news websites. Instead, let’s recognize that the way to make money, in news or any other industry, is to find and meet the needs of audience and customers. It’s not to annoy them, harass them or frustrate them. Pageview-inflating galleries, lazy mobile “optimization” and one-size-fits-all design might help the bottom line in the short-term by inflating revenue or cutting costs. But ours is an industry that’s too long put off long-term thinking in favor of real and imagined short-term crises.

At some point, if you fail to meet your audience and customers’ needs, you fail. We don’t have to end up that way. But we will if we don’t start doing a better job of doing things such as creating better mobile news designs.

Here’s hoping more of us learn this lesson, so I don’t have to write this piece again next year.

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.

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.

USC Annenberg journalism student Dominique Fong was part of a team of AMVmobile fellowship students tasked with devising mobile strategies for the Los Angeles Times. Other students on this team: Vibhor Mathur (USC Viterbi School of Engineering), Jason Choi (Viterbi)

Overview

Our mobile strategy recommendations for the Los Angeles Times are grounded in the “3 Ps” best practices identified by the Project for Excellence in Journalism in a report on the trend of more participatory behaviors in the way that people consume news: participation, portability and personalization. The challenge of increasing revenue within existing corporate restraints led us to consider a fourth “P,” partnership, to more efficiently accomplish innovation across multiple digital platforms while increasing revenue potential.

Participation

Because millions of mobile users already turn to the Times to stay informed and fill idle moments, the organization should seek to maximize user engagement (and, consequently, brand affinity) among existing users while also attracting new ones. Implementing four new features would advance this agenda. Expanded integration of social media by adding a multipurpose widget (like Slate.com’s right column on its website) to a mobile app or WAP would allow users to engage with content over their networks without having to leave the Times site. Another idea is a thumb up/thumb down rating option, like the Daily Beast, which lets users immediately voice their opinion about what articles are most newsworthy with the incentive that more popular content is given higher standing on the home page. Third is a save option, giving readers an incentive to revisit content and advertising in the Times app. Fourth is empowering audiences to upload content directly to the newspaper, similar to CNN’s iReport but more immediate and intuitive (using the existing website photo-sharing mechanism and possibly through a partnership with Foursquare).

Portability

The intrinsic portability of mobile phones is a strong argument to exploit geolocation, a feature within an app to track and mark a user’s location. To prevent privacy infringement, organizations should offer users the option to decline permission for detecting their location. The Times can offer targeted newsfeeds, such as alerts for bomb scares, news according to neighborhood from the mapping project, and selective, exclusive restaurant reviews from the dining and calendar section databases. Geolocation can also improve advertising campaigns by triggering ad displays relevant to a user’s specific location.

Personalization

Segmentation of audiences based on user behavior and preferences will add value to advertising packages by allowing customers to more precisely target specific user groups. Brief opt-in surveys regarding user demographics, consumption behaviors and content preferences would facilitate targeted advertising campaigns while allowing users to partially customize their content experience. In addition to global ads, the Times would also be able to facilitate more precise customer to audience interaction through localized banners or interactive ads (including “click to call,” “where to buy,” and “save for later” options) that change according to the user’s characteristics, habits and location. The advantages of interactive ads, of particular importance to tablets, are exemplified by an ad for cameras in a Sports Illustrated iPad app.

Another easily implementable segmentation option would be to enable mobile device detection on apps and the mobile site. When an app detects that it is displaying Times content on a feature phone, ads for “upgrade to iPhone” or for phone-specific games and ringtones could appear. Click-through rates have been successful for the Helsinki Sanomat, which uses Starcut, the same WAP site developer as the Times.

Partnerships

In order to move quickly, the Times should consider partnering with third party mobile ad networks that offer premium and geolocated ads, or look into licensing technology from those networks. Adlocal provides detailed metrics and real-time revenue counts as well as geolocation compatibility, as do competitors such as Acuity Mobile, AppLoop, AdInfuse and Yowza (an iPhone app that offers geo-aware coupons). Collaborative agreements with existing premium advertisers could guarantee revenue from creation of an iPad app, as Chase collaborated with The New York Times. Instead of following trends, strategic partnerships with key existing customers and leading technology firms could position the Times to advance both innovation and revenue growth, better serving audiences and customers.

Los Angeles Times WAP site with more interactive features:

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.

According to our research, the tablet will be very popular in Orange County as early as next year, which means the hefty investment is likely to be worth it in the long run.

As a team, we first decided that the Register had four main sources of providing news content: print, online, mobile and tablet (in order from oldest to newest). We then determined the audience affected by these different sources to be readers, advertisers and the Register itself.

We researched, debated and consulted readers, advertisers and experts to confidently assert that journalism was moving from print towards the tablet.

From the Register’s perspective, the tablet holds the most potential for generating the most revenue. Readers are willing to pay for subscriptions because tablets deliver the most current and personalized content. Advertisements can be different sizes, different media, extremely high quality, QR coded and geo-location based, which will enable the Register to charge substantially more than they do online.

From the advertisers’ perspective, the tablet has the ability to direct ads to specific audiences, to receive and track responses to ads and to display high-quality, instantly effective ads. In other words, tablet advertising will be worth the price.

And from the readers’ perspective, the tablet will become the most convenient multimedia tool in the future. A reader can e-mail, watch TV shows and movies, listen to music, read and interact through social media in one place. It’s the improved webpage that people will pay for because it provides the intimacy of a traditional newspaper, modern sleekness, and the ability to interact with content and to share content through e-mail and social media.

The fact that there is proven future for news organizations in the tablet is a hard for print monopolies to digest, however it is a fact that must be accepted in order for news organizations to stay up to pace with technology.

I know I am speaking for my whole team when I say this experience was as eye opening to us as it was for the news organizations. And personally, my hesitations about the declining field of journalism were transformed into anticipation for the rise of an exciting, mobilized journalism.

With Steve Jobs’ announcement at yesterday’s press preview of the new iPhone OS 4.0, Apple’s now in the ad network business. Like Google before it, Apple is opening the advertising market to a new group that didn’t have easy, direct access to it before – in this case, mobile application developers.

Sure, many current apps are ad-supported: Just cruise through the iPhone app store and look at how many apps come in two versions – a paid one and an ad-supported “free” or “lite” version. But by integrating an ad service system with the iPhone’s operating system, which will now support multi-tasking, Apple’s new iAds have the potential for offering a far superior user experience than current “click-away” ads.

We’ll have to see iAds in a live environment before the publishing industry will learn if the iAd’s improved functionality leads to better click-through rates among iPhone application users. Thanks to a generation of lousy ads for lousy products, many consumers have been conditioned to hate ads, and either to ignore them or ignore applications or publications that place them too obtrusively within their content.

Functionality is nice. The ability to stay within the application while viewing an expanded ad is helpful both to readers and to publishers. But, ultimately, that functionality doesn’t matter to someone who never clicks or selects an ad.

Apple will need to find a way, working with its app developer partners, to improve click-through rates on ad-supported apps, if app publishers are to see any significant increase in revenue from iAds.

Publishers currently making significant income from app sales will want to keep an eye on how popular iAds become, too. If the public accepts the iAd format, expect to see a rush of publishers abandon “pay” applications in favor of offering iAd-supported free ones, ultimately pressuring other publications to drop (or eliminate) their application prices, as well.

One of the great utilities that Google has provided its AdSense publishers is access to Google’s eye-tracking research showing the “hot spots” within various common webpage designs, to guide page designers on the most effective place to position banner ads. Apple will need to have similar research in hand, and be willing to share it with developers, to maximize click-through potential for the iAd.

Similarly, Apple will need to develop a sub-community within its developer community, devoted to analyzing ad design. As a news publisher who’s been tracking the click-through performance of hundreds of ads run on my sites over the past few years, I’ve learned some valuable lessons about which elements within ads elicit clicks from my users. That’s information that advertisers and publishers will need to learn from the iAd environment. Apple’s in the best position to facilitate the conversations that will lead to such learning. If it fails to do so, the learning process will take much longer for all involved, damaging the iAd’s potential for success.

Ultimately, though, the iAd will succeed or fail on its content. Is what is being advertised in an iAd something of interest to a particular app’s users, or not?

Google’s brilliance was not in selling text (and, later, banner) ads on publishers’ websites, it was how it did that. Google created an automated process by which “long-tail” advertisers could bid on previously unsold space on “long-tail” publishers’ websites – sites that often did not have well-paying ads before AdSense, due to those publishers’ inability (or lack of knowledge how) to sell ads.

Google extended the advertising market, by matching smaller advertisers with smaller publishers in a way that nevertheless resulted in highly targeted ads. Eventually, bigger players got involved, and now you can find slick, Flash ads from Fortune 100 companies running on one-person blogs, as well as text ads from mom-and-pop stores on the webpages of major traditional news publications.

Apple’s not yet provided the details on how it will sell iAds. Nor has it said if it will enable publishers to sell into the iAd space, as Google’s AdSense partners can do (and very easily, using Google’s AdManager system). Apple bought mobile advertising company Quattro Wireless earlier this year, giving it a strong head start in luring large advertisers and publishers to the iAd.

But the big money online is not in servicing a few large accounts. It’s in servicing millions of smaller ones. If all iAds do is to provide a slightly better functioning advertising tool for businesses already engaged in mobile advertising, it might provide a nicely improved revenue stream to those companies. But if Apple can find a way to expand the market for mobile advertising the way that Google did on the Web with its text ads, then Apple will transform mobile application publishing, creating a powerful economic incentive for millions of people to start developing their own apps.

But today, I’d like to highlight another frustrating practice by some news organizations – publishing incomplete articles to the mobile version of their websites or smartphone apps.

I’m illustrating two examples here today, but I’ve encountered so many on my iPhone over the past several weeks that I often wonder if many news organizations employ anyone to actually read their mobile publications, or if they merely entrusted their mobile versions and apps to automated processes.

With mobile news attracting a growing audience, news publishers simply can’t afford to take the Ron Popeil approach to their mobile publications – “set it and forget it.” They must devote some eyeballs toward a backread of all that they produce.

Unwatched content online inevitably becomes broken content – whether it be an automatically generated mobile app, a reader-driven forum or columnist’s comments page. Watch your content, and it might still break, but at least someone will catch the problem, allowing for a swift fix.

Earlier this week, I tried to read a story on USA Today’s otherwise delightful iPhone app about a survey questioning Americans about President Obama and his performance to date.

That’s where the story on the iPhone app ended. You couldn’t scroll down to take that “closer look.” The story abruptly ended right there.

Now, here’s how the story looked in a laptop Web browser:

You can see that USA Today had built a table-driven display, featuring an individual representing each of the several categories of respondents that USA Today had identified in its poll.

Now, here was the front page of the travel section on MSNBC’s mobile version last night:

Hey, I love Hawaii! Let’s click and take a look at some of those tips for a cheap trip to Oahu:

Uh…. huh? Yep, that’s it: a head, a deck and a shirttail. No article.

Let’s now fire up the laptop and see how the piece looks in the “normal” version of Safari:

Oh, it’s a photo gallery. It appears that MSNBC hasn’t yet devised a way to transfer content from online photo galleries into mobile pages. Indeed, MSNBC frequently uses this technique for travel articles, especially with tips and “best of” lists, and none of them ever comes up fully on its mobile site.

Neither of these were isolated examples, buried deep within their mobile versions. The USA Today article was on the “top stories” tab of its iPhone app, and the Oahu “non-article” was the lead piece on its Travel section.

Clearly, these omissions represent significant usability failures for these publishers, as well as any others guilty of the same errors. If you can’t port an article over to your mobile version in a useable format, better not to attempt to publish there at all.

But, better yet, news publishers should take the advice that many online journalists have been offering from years – quit encasing your content in a single, specific format. Store it XML, or some other format, that can easily adapt to multiple publishing formats for multiple devices. Then assign someone to look at the product, before or after publication, to ensure that it’s come through properly. If it hasn’t, hold that article until you can fix it. It’s time to show mobile readers some love, and not hope that they’ll remain content with whatever feed your tech crew wrote.

News organization’s desire to create impressive Web graphics and presentations becomes counter-productive when those presentations are not available to mobile users. It doesn’t matter how pretty your design team makes something if the fastest growing segment of your market can never see it.