Why have we stopped talking about mobile?

Major news conferences are now tackling shiny new tech topics like bots and AI, and mixed, augmented and virtual reality, for journalism. While these are important topics that have their place in the conversation, one essential topic is being dangerously overlooked: mobile.

While most readers aren’t using VR on a daily basis, mobile devices dominate daily life, and should therefore be prioritised by media organisations. So why has this topic faded into the background of conferences and industry news? Koren explains that news organisations responded to the mobile revolution by developing an app and a mobile responsive site, and stopping there. It may also be that mobile strategy is becoming synonymous with social strategy. While the overlap is undeniable, the small screen has much storytelling potential outside of social platforms.

Push notifications are not a new technology, but one that deserves a fresh look. Most organisations already use them, so it’s an easy way to experiment, observe, and develop more meaningful engagement on mobile. On a panel at newsrewired, Des Shoe, editor at The New York Times said, “The lock screen is the new home page.”

Some organisations have been using live video in push notifications, which are enabled in iOS 10. The Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab experimented with this format for Trump’s inauguration in January. Although it was a limited roll-out (620 users), the response was positive: generating high levels of engagement and satisfaction (according to a survey).

Video (both live and not), and multimedia push notifications are not yet mainstream and remain in audience testing phase. One issue is that only delivering to iOS 10 will leave out much of your audience. PushApps addresses this problem with a tool that allows delivery of multimedia push notifications with photo, video and survey features to Android as well as iOS.

Metrics in push notifications are tricky. On the newsrewired panel, when asked what a good clickthrough rate was, Shoe struggled to give a precise stat. She finally said that 50% is very good. Success is indeed hard to determine by clickthroughs. Are more clicks good because you got the reader interested in learning more? Are fewer clicks better because the alert was informative enough to satisfy the reader? In push alerts, success will be different across news organisations, and across different notifications. Lazar also recommends paying attention to Android vs. iOS user response: “It does not matter in which has more downloads, but which OS users interact with your push notifications more. The publishers should consider the different UX and measure the user’s reaction.”

Lately a ‘mobile-first’ approach has been eschewed for ‘content first’. Fair point, but with some news organisations seeing more than 50% of their traffic coming from smartphones, editors should be thinking of their content first on mobile.

Apart from push alerts, what are other ways to experiment and innovate mobile storytelling? The Guardian is also looking at how to do more with audio storytelling on mobile, offline reading geared towards commuters, and keeping track of a user’s progress on a topic, and only serving them new information on that topic. Furthermore, at GEN’s Editors Lab Final 2017, the winning team from BBC News Visual Journalism came up with a tool to simplify news on mobile. Appy Helper is a conversational interface, which sits alongside long-running and complex news stories, to help readers understand, and catch up with recent related developments.

When it comes to testing a new feature on mobile, Koren suggested experimenting short-term and on a small scale, like using a sporting event. You don’t need an innovation lab to make progress: she advised finding people in the newsroom with similar interests and complementary skill sets to yours, and seeing what you can build together. And always, Koren said, “Be the person in every project who asks, ‘But what does it look like on mobile?’”

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