By Rick Edmonds
Media Business Analyst
WASHINGTON -- At the mid-point of the joint annual newspaper industry conference, there is a clear leader in business buzz -- the chance that serving content and ads to mobile devices is the next big revenue opportunity.
British newspaper consultant Jim Chisholm said so directly in an early-bird session I participated in Sunday morning on international perspectives. The cost is coming down, and the devices are getting larger and more flexible, Chisholm said. While mobile is one of those innovations that has been about to arrive in a big way here for five years now, he said, Eric Schmidt of Google and others are saying this will be the year.
The mobile market is already flourishing in the Far East and other places abroad, Chisholm said, and by his calculation advertising/marketing revenues in the medium will surpass conventional online advertising revenues by early the next decade.
That the potential for mobile is more than one man's opinion became evident in a lightly attended session late Monday morning when Associated Press President and CEO Tom Curley unveiled a complex package of rate cuts and new products. The centerpiece is something to be called Mobile News Network, tailored specifically to deliver news to Apple's iPhone (and potentially to other smart phones).
The idea is to provide a common platform that will allow participating AP member papers to deliver their top local news to iPhones -- and to sell local advertising to mobile audiences.
When the publishing track attendees got back to work after lunch -- it was more of the same -- lots of esoteric discussion of properly tagging and repackaging data for, among other things, serving the mobile market. It is all newer than new; the Newspaper Association of America is trying to get editorial, advertising, IT staffs and vendors to begin to create "a common architecture and a common vocabulary" so far lacking in responding to the mobile market opportunity.
As my colleague Butch Ward discusses in a separate piece on takeaways for editorial leaders, this conference represents a lot of progress in newspapers' embracing the creative and public service opportunities for online story-telling. The less good news is that we may be facing the same sort of exercise all over again in creating content that is substantive, engaging (not to mention ethical) for the mobile tsunami just ahead.
