Going Mobile:
Who will be New Jersey’s digital sherpa?
There’s a lot going on in the world of digital publishing, especially when it comes to the changing mobile landscape. Mobile innovation labs like the one at the Guardian are popping up left and right, new social and content sharing apps are released virtually every day, and the Internet giants are constantly updating the way users interact with their products at every level.
Some of these changes are merely cosmetic (although that doesn’t necessarily make them irrelevant or inconsequential). Facebook, for example, just supplemented their iconic “Like” feature by adding five new “reaction” options, and Google released a new developer tool for analytics last month. Sometimes these kinds of changes don’t have that much of an effect on the way publishers do business online, especially at the local level, so a lot of smaller publications don’t even pay attention to them — and why would they?
At the same time, there are bigger, more substantial changes on the horizon that local publishers definitely need to be thinking about if they don’t want to be left even further behind. This week, for example, Google announced a new pilot app program to make payments with Android pay more seamless. Next month, Facebook plans to open up Instant Articles to independent publishers. There’s also a lot of commotion around Google’s new Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project, which is somewhat similar to Instant Articles. Snapchat is quickly becoming (some would argue it has been for a while) a major player in the mobile news delivery game and, based on the way things seem to be headed, they’ll be looking to open up their coveted Discover feature to a range of new publishers somewhere down the line.
These are the types of changes that publishers of all shapes and sizes should at least be aware of, if not actively studying and trying to find ways to incorporate them into their operations.
But keeping up with the digital zeitgeist isn’t just about being ready for the next big Google release or the next round of Facebook reactions. It’s also about understanding how users interact with your content, where and how they find it, what makes them stick around, what turns them away — what excites them and what bores them. That requires keeping an unblinking eye on the latest trends in content creation, distribution, and consumption.
The problem is, most local publications are run by one or two overworked and underpaid multi-disciplinarians who spend what little free time they have (if any) either sleeping or staring off into the distance, thinking about what their life has become. For example, most of the publishers I’ve worked with don’t have time to sit around and think about how to produce and incorporate silent videos into their content platform in order to take advantage of Facebook’s autoplay features.
Most of them are so busy worrying about selling their next ad or publishing their next feature, that it would be ridiculous to ask them to spend an extra hour pouring over the latest Nieman Reports at the end of the day in the hopes that they can get hip to the next big tech wave before it passes them by.
That’s why it’s important for organizations like the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University to step up and serve as a digital sherpa of sorts for the local news ecosystem. The Center is uniquely positioned to be able to respond to the needs of small-scale digital publishers and will look out for their best interests, especially when they don’t have the time or the resources to do it themselves.
