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

June 15, 2010 by

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.

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Student journalist/entrepreneurs offer tips to improve newspapers' WAP functionality

June 11, 2010 by

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: Part I

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:

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Student journalist/entrepreneurs look at mobile tablet strategies for newspapers

June 8, 2010 by

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.

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.

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