Aiming for the Inbox
by Daniel Riewe
Friday, March 26, 2010
Would you invest in a telegraph if your town sat next to a Pony Express station and had no telegraph pole?
Before the transcontinental railroad, a ship could cross the Pacific Ocean faster than the Pony Express could travel from the West to the East Coast. So in 1848 the news of gold in California reached Hong Kong before it reached Boston. Thousands of Chinese risk takers set sail for what they called the Golden Mountain. They populated California.
The Pony Express has long been replaced by the telegraph, radio, TV, and the personal computer. But as someone who follows the evolution of the news business, I often wonder whether the 21st century's version of the Pony Express won't be the PC but the cellphone. According to Morgan Stanley, more users will access the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years.
The mobile phone's explosive growth might be the reason why news entrepreneurs like me think of skipping the flashy Web page altogether and focus on mobile apps or mobile-friendly websites to deliver news content. Today two-thirds of the world's population has a mobile phone subscription -- four billion people -- and there will be five billion wireless subscribers worldwide by the end of this year, according to some estimates.
If you were launching a news publication today, how much effort would you put into mobile delivery, knowing that in the US over a quarter adults now read news on their cellphones?
"Mobile will soon have more reach than TV, radio or the Internet," a Google executive said this week. "We're looking at mobile across the entire world as a global play."
Maybe the real questions for delivering news in a local market is, where do your customers access the news, and what kind of news are you producing? Headlines are ideal for cellphones, where speed of delivery is key. But detailed stories are mostly read on paper or a screen that is larger than four inches in size. In American Fork, where the number of iPhone or iPad users will never break any record, it might be best to stick with what people have -- email. Because email is ubiquitous, reaching even the cell phone, you can reach your readers at the place they access most: their Inboxes, wherever they are.
