Redefining Journalism In a Mobile World
I find myself ricocheting every day between two defining periods of my journalistic life. The first: the early ’70s, when my passion for journalism formed around the Vietnam War and Watergate. The second: 2008 to 2010, when I started a company (True/slant) and paired that passion with ideas for new models for journalism and advertising. Journalistic romance and media economics don’t coexist well in newsrooms, but in a post-brexit, post-u.s.-election world, I pace around ours talking about quality journalism and our business needs in the same breath.
As everyone at Forbes knows, my quality/business mantra is especially directed at our mobile future as desktop consumers continue to dwindle. We’ve been adapting to that reality for some time. Last week, a colleague who helped build True/ Slant and the resulting Forbes contributor model hit me with a number that dramatically illustrates how our newsroom is changing. Only 16 months ago, he and a lone sidekick took on the mobile-content challenge. Now 18 people focus each day on mobile/social storytelling, editing and distribution. Most of those folks sit in close proximity to a newly combined product and technology team that is propelling our mobile efforts to new heights with m.forbes.com, our non-beta beta.
The story formats in this magazine—and almost all print publications—are pretty much what you get online. In fact, the article paradigm hasn’t changed much in 100 years. The mobile phone threatens to finally blow it up. Screen dimensions are certainly a factor. Equally powerful are the needs of on-the-go mobile consumers. They want their information presented more efficiently for quick consumption and sharing with others.
That’s why m.forbes.com is both a horizontal and vertical swiping experience. Swipe what are effectively cards or modules from right to left and get a scanning experience. Swipe up to drill in-depth into any of the cards. We will always have long-form stories, but our focus at the top layer of m.forbes .com is information bites: text stories of varying lengths, data, photos, video and much more.
Unlike most of our traditional media brethren, we’ve made the leap from a print to a digital desktop business. The big trick for us now is defining quality in the mobile world, executing on it and building a business around it. That means producing premium content for a premium ad experience that appeals to our loyal customers and new ones, too. I know we have the passion, and ideas are flowing. The right mobile product is sure to follow.