What I learned from the publishing industry.

I had the privilege to work on one of the hottest high tech product on the market these days, Mobile Applications for smartphones. In only two short years, I have seen the landscape of these products change tremendously: Android surpassing iPhone, the introduction of (real) tablets in the marketplace, the death of the WebOS platform… These events among many others meant that Handmark had to adapt very quickly and that our product roadmap kept changing even in the middle of sprints. It was nearly impossible to foresee what would happen even within the next quarter.

The product we worked on called the Mobile Publishing Platform was targeted to publishers, such as local and national newspapers and TV stations. As we know, these two media outlets audience are declining rapidly and are quickly being replaced by more popular online products.

The shift has been occurring since the explosion of the Internet in the late 1990s. Of all the “old” media, newspapers have the most to lose from the Internet.

Freedom Communications, one of the accounts that I worked with was very well aware of the trend and two years ago when I started working with them, could already forecast the same shift that would affect Newspapers with Mobile applications growth.

What I found remarkable about working with them was that unlike other newspapers that dreaded the fact that their physical copy was intentionally being and pushed to be replaced by an online technology, Freedom embraced the change.

On a trip to visit their office in Anaheim, California, I had a better understanding why they had so much interest in mobile: the applications could provide readership habit information impossible to extract from a website and much less from a physical newspaper.

Media outlets and newspapers are most interested in readership for advertising sales, and readership is correlated to what they call article relevance. Some questions all editors face on a daily basis related to article relevance are impossible to answer without visibility in metrics only available through online sources:

• What should our journalists write about?
• How long should their articles be?
• When should they write about it?
• Which section of the newspaper should this article be published under?

“Mobile Marketing Is the Most Personal Form of Web Marketing I like to joke that the only thing more personal than a person's cell phone is his underwear” Mobile Marketing by Cindy Krum


There are many attributes and metrics that define the relevance grade in mobile applications. For example:

1. Page views: The number of times the article has been selected from the headline view. Although this may seem like a perfect metric, it deviates as you see a decrease in page views based on the position of the article. There is a downward clicking trends as the article is placed further down in a list.
2. Time spent on article: The amount of time a reader spends reading an article they selected. This has a higher relevance grade compared to page views. The average American adult reads prose text at 250 to 300 words per minute. If an article is 600 words but takes a reader a recorded average of 4 minutes, the article may not be as interesting as its title / headline
3. Length of article: A metric attached to Time spent on article. If an article has a high page view but low time spent on it, it may be recommended to only show a small portion on the front page and let the reader find out about its length further in the publication
4. SMS and Push to visit: Mobile phones are able to receive SMS and Push notifications. Editors are able to know if an alert is relevant based on the push to visit ratio, the total number of alerts open divided by the number of subscribers. Based on the day and time of the alert sent, the publisher is able to capture some trends of use. SMS and Push are instant and are usually viewed within seconds after they are being sent.

What I began to understand was that the success of a newspaper today can only be attributed by the amount of visibility their editors and publishers have in those metrics and those metrics can only be attainable through modern online products.
What we thought two decades ago to be mutually exclusive media channels turn out to be complementing one another.