NYT Mobile Goes By the Numbers
Important Details: News sites have been slow to optimize their deep content for mobile, though the reach of mobile is impressive and growing at a great clip. Now the New York Times has joined the ranks of the optimized. Announced last week, the Times, partnered with Starcut, has now mobilized its content. It has eliminated all the slow-loading clutter of section headers, making it faster to get at all the stuff found at the Times own website, even the Times Select columnists, if you are a Times Select customer.
Open up the www.m.nytimes.com URL, and you can get as many as 10 stories, biggest and/or most recent news of the day, oddly numbered from top to bottom. If you want something other than the top stories of the moment, many of which you may have heard at the top of the hour on radio, or when you peeked at CNN or Fox or MSNBC, you can get there. At the very bottom of the opening page, you will find navigation to the Times’ sections: business, sports, arts, etc.
It’s the newspaper metaphor writ small. While the Times’ own recent website redesign has learned how to pack more diverse content onto a first screen, this first mobile product is back-to-the-future. You’re given the top news, but no direct access to the many reasons (movie reviews, Mets updates, Broadway capsules, Joe Nocera, Frank Rich, 9/11 editorials and op-eds, special sections+++) for which many readers use the Times. On a Friday evening, it’s the same format; the new product doesn’t attempt to "day-part", moving to a greater entertainment or weekend orientation as the work week ends. . Readers can get it to all Times’ web content, clicking through numerous screens.
It’s clear that mobile is no longer a small niche. A recent report by Wireless Intelligence tracked the fact that there are now 2.5 billion cellular connections globally, up from 2 billion less than 12 months ago. In the U.S., various reports have put penetration at about two-thirds of the population, with, of course, increasing number of new handsets capable of delivering news and information.
In Outsell’s Opinion: Out of the box, the initial product is underwhelming, with often-redundant top news taking the whole page and the rest of the Times’ experience almost an afterthought.
The Times says it has a lot more planned — weather, stock prices, sports scores and movie show times. We just would expect that after waiting this long to produce a serious mobile product, the splash would be splashier. Already on the market are more engaging products from CNN (top-of-page links to most popular features), MSNBC (good top-of-page dropdown menu) and ESPN (good display of data). A good piece — "Buried Treasure" — in Monday’s Wall Street Journal notes the lengths to which cell phone companies are going to unearth deep content for users.
We note one such unexplored buried treasure in the Times new product, an irony of the mobile/audio age. One of the Times’ oldest experiments is its downloadable audio excerpts, partnered with Audible. They’ve been around for a while, and iTunes has brought new customers to them. Wouldn’t it be nice to a link to the Audible Times’ product on the Times’ mobile product? After all…..it’s a phone! Talk about cross-platform synergy. If you had your Treo docked on your desk, maybe you press a button, and listen to your Times’ download, while working.
In some ways the Times is a special case, and in some ways, not at all.
Increasingly, in our turbulent times, the Times is the national paper of America. Its very ability to report and analyze the news is important to the Republic, and that makes its business health vital to us all. The Times’ Internet initiatives have been a mixed bag, sometimes worthy in their inventiveness and sometimes painfully slow and behind the curve. In this case, with mobile, which will become a prime access point for Americans in the years ahead, the Times needs to do better and quickly. Its ability to offer lots of choice, audio and video, in addition to text, all under-girded by a business model that enables staff growth, is essential. We’re hoping round 2 of its mobile initiatives is a great leap forward.
There are lessons in this for all news companies that are mobilizing their content. Think customers and what they will likely want to use, which may vary by day and time. Think of their whole lives, not just the fact that they like to know the latest. Think about what you have uniquely, what’s not duplicated many times over on other media — and feature it on the first screen of the handset.