- Chapter 7 -
DIGITAL DELIVERY PLATFORMS OF THE FUTURE
INTRODUCTION
“That the newspaper sector is changing is clear - but companies willing to invest in new forms of delivery, which have a commitment to quality, will prosper." Following, these words of advice from Rupert Murdoch, news organizations around the world have been engaged in recent years in active efforts to harness the strengths of new platforms for news delivery. Among the most promising platforms, mobile phones and e-paper have long been touted as potential saviors for the news industry. Caution must be taken. The mobile Web market is just beginning to boom and it might be some time before mobile news really picks up. As for e-Paper, manufacturers are taking big strides towards producing a flexible, portable and full-color model – but most current E-readers remain static, black-and-white and proprietary. Until manufacturers conceive a product that fully satisfies consumers, newspapers will have to stand ready.
HOW THE iPHONE CHANGED MOBILE NEWS
The widespread commercialization and public embrace of the Apple’s iPhone, thanks to its innovative and intuitive mobile Web navigation, has led to evolutions in mobile Web consumption in the US – and will perhaps lead to the development of the mobile news market.
Six months after the iPhone’s launch in the US, a January 2008 survey of more than 10,000 adults by M:Metrics found that:
- 84.8% of iPhone users accessed news and information on their phones compared to 13.1% of the overall mobile phone market and 58.2% of total smartphone owners, including Blackberries and devices that run Windows.
- 58.6% of iPhone users visited a search engine on their phone, compared to 37% of smartphone users in general and 6.1% of mobile phone users.
- 30.9% of iPhone users have tuned into mobile TV or a video clip from their phone, which is more than double the percentage that have watched on a smartphone.
A PAPERLESS WORLD?
On one hand, there's a 2007 report entitled "Hamlet's Blackberry: Why Paper Is Eternal," written by William Powers, media critic for the National Journal in the US. For Powers, all this talk about readers' migration to digital formats isn't taking into account the millennial virtues of "the most successful communications innovation of the last 2000 years."
On the other hand, there's a flurry of e-paper proponents and early adopters, as exemplified by a June 2008 editorial in The Guardian, a major news outlet that still heavily relies on the strengths - revenues - of print, that assessed that readers "are starting to migrate in earnest to electronic reading devices, and the interesting thing is that early adopters are surprised at what an agreeable experience it is."
CONCLUSION Everyblock.com: What’s happening in your neighborhood?
Newspapers may possess an advantage in the realm of hyperlocal news: most of them have long reached out to the community they serve through the print edition. Pure-online players, on the other hand, have to build up a name in the communities they wish to target. But this hasn’t slowed the widespread emergence of these sites, led by Everyblock.com, a hyperlocal venture in the US set up by former Knight News Challenge winner Adrian Holovaty.
|
