I’ve been a nomad worker for some time. And I’m shocked at how few journalists seem to be prepared for mobile working. So I thought I’d offer a few tips.

If you can afford it, buy your own equipment.

I’ve been buying my own laptop for nearly 30 years, and while it brings pain to my pocket, I’d never dream of relying on my company’s equipment. In the old days it was because they were too slow and cumbersome, but nowadays it’s mainly because of compliance issues: restrictions on what software you can put on your laptop, as well as what the company is allowed to do and view on its hardware. I would rather retain control over how I organise my information and what apps I use.

Buy your own software.

I’m admittedly a bit of a software addict. (I think it’s probably a thing, I haven’t checked.) But there’s a reason for it: we spend most of our day at our computers, so it makes sense to find the software that best helps you. And with journalists, that’s a broad array of tasks: if you’re a freelance, you want to be measuring your word count and timing how long you’re spending on something. If you’re writing a lot then you want an app that looks aesthetically pleasing (I can’t stand Microsoft Word, and hate it when I see journalists writing stories in it, but that’s me). Then there’s how you collect and store information, be it from the net or from interviews. It needs to go somewhere and it needs to be easily retrievable when you want to write. More on this another time.

Get a decent mouse.

There’s a guy in my co-working space that still uses his Macbook touchpad, that rectangle near the keyboard, to move the mouse around. Very few people are adept at this, so it’s painful to watch guys like my co-worker waste hours a day scrambling around. Buy a mouse. Really. They’re cheap — you can even get a bluetooth one for less than $50 these days, so you don’t even need to take up a USB port. I guarantee it will save you an hour a day.

Save your own neck.

Mobile journalism can mean standing up, moving around, but most of the time it means bringing enough equipment with you to be able to work away from the office — a hotel room, a conference centre, or whatever. This is where I see far too many people hunched over a laptop, looking like Scrooge on Boxing Day. The problem with laptops is they weren’t designed for posture. But you can fix that, with a $20 stand. These are light, foldable, and lift the screen up to a height closer to eye level, which is where it should be. You’ll need to bring an external keyboard with you, but they’re cheap and light too, and your chiropractor will thank you.

While you’re at it get a second screen.

Here’s another tip: Laptop screens are too small to store more than what you’re writing on. If all your source mverkkorahaterial is also stored on your computer, then you’ll need a second screen. You likely have dual monitors in the office, so just because you’re on the road, why should you deny yourself that luxury? There are some good cheap monitors that don’t even require a power supply — plug them into your USB port and they’ll draw the power from there. For several years I had a AOC monitor, which was basic but did the job. I recently upgraded to an Asus monitor which is a beauty, and has made me much more productive and the envy of my co-workers — even the guy fiddling around with the touchpad.

A word of warning to Mac users: recent updates to their operating system have broken the drivers necessary to get the most out of these second screens, but there is a workaround that half fixes it. Email me if you need help.

Be safe.

Being mobile with cool equipment does leave you vulnerable to theft, either financially or politically motivated. Don’t take your main laptop with you to places like China. Have a cheap backup laptop with just the bare essentials on it. Always put your laptop in the room safe, and, if you want to be super clever, buy a small external USB drive to store any sensitive data on, and keep that in your pocket. Samsung do some nice, SSD (solid state, and hence smaller, faster) drives, the latest called T3. I attach mine to the laptop with velcro and then remove it and put it in my pocket when I’m heading off to dinner.

Stay connected.

Don’t trust other people’s wifi. Bring your own. I have a wifi modem, still 3G, which does me fine. Buy a local data SIM card and fire it up. Everyone in your team now has internet access — and the bad guys sniffing the free hotel or coffee shop wireless network will be frustrated.

Finally, stay cool.

By far the most popular thing in my mobile toolkit is a USB fan. Most conference venues are either too hot or too cold, and it’s amazing what a $2 fan can do.

Quartz, which is owned by Atlantic Media, prides itself on its originality in delivering news – its pioneering daily email newsletter has nearly 200,000 subscribers – and its newest innovation doesn’t disappoint.

Writing in Techcrunch, Jon Russell says that “using a clear and clean design aesthetic, the Quartz bot interacts with you, offering up news stories which you can choose to get more information about or move on to the next.” A simple chat interface lets users decide on the level of detail – if you want, more just ask for it. The app has been rolled out for iPhones, with Android to follow soon.

For Mathew Ingram, writing in Fortune, “it looks and feels dramatically unlike almost every other news app available.” Its simplicity is its appeal, and the experience of using it is like a personal conversation. “There’s no front-page style list of headlines and images, there isn’t even a time-sorted feed of stories. There’s just what looks like a friend texting you, asking you in speech bubbles (complete with emojis) what you are interested in reading about.” You navigate by replying with simple phrases like ‘tell me more’ or ‘what’s next’. Another bonus is that it’s ad-free, except for a sponsor’s message at the end.

Writing in imediaconnection, Tom Edwards is ‘incredibly impressed’ by the app the “that gives the user the illusion that they are in control of the content experience“. There are three aspects that he particularly likes:

• Conversational flow: it creates an immediate bond with users because it’s so familiar.
• User-controlled experience: With an option to direct the experience by clicking on emojis, it makes you feel like you’re in control – it’s more conversational than disruptive.
• Conversational advertising: Over time, it will be possible to build a robust profile of users based on their interactions and integrate advertising as part of a conversation.

Edwards finishes by saying: “Kudos to the Quartz team for delivering a highly conversational approach to information overload and understanding the importance of empowering the consumer.” High praise indeed.

The logical next step for Quartz is to go native, according to Isabelle Niu in fusion.net – “getting on existing messaging apps and learning to become another person I talk to about current events, latest trends or viral videos.”

But as she points out, in China this is already an everyday reality. “Without the competition of Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, a monstrosity called WeChat dominates the social media scene in the world’s largest smartphone market. WeChat incorporates some features of most western social networks, but it started out as a messaging app, and messaging is still at its heart.”

More than half a billion people a day log in to WeChat. Public accounts, which are like blogs, are integrated into the chat experience and many have distinctive personalities that enable an interchange between users and publishers. “It’s a bit like having a private messaging thread with the writer you like.”

Niu wonders whether this type of exchange could point to the future of news in an age of information overload. “We-media consumers generally tune in to only a couple of publishers, who must carefully time and choose what they want to say in order to stay at the party. The future of publishing is to become one of those publishers.”

The Quartz app for iPhone can be downloaded here.

An article in The Wall Street Journal claims that desktop usage isn’t decreasing, as is often claimed. Jack Marshall explains that while the share of the market enjoyed by mobile internet access is growing fast, the total time spent online from desktops isn’t falling and might even be increasing.

However, Thad McIlroy on the Future of Publishing blog says this interpretation is misleading. The data The Wall Street Journal bases its findings on “encompasses all desktop computer usage, the majority of which relates to the Microsoft and Adobe application suites as well as email”.

“The real story is not that the PC usage is up, but that simultaneous device use — usually called ‘multi-platform’ — has changed the device landscape.” McIlroy says that data from another comScore report, The U.S. Digital Future in Focus 2015, shows that the number of people only using desktops to access the internet is declining sharply in all age groups, even the 55+ segment, and that across all ages the amount of mobile-only users is also growing fast.

This interpretation of the data – that mobile is growing at the expense of desktop – seems to be backed up by Google, which recently confirmed that it’s now serving more Google searches on smartphones than desktops in 10 counties, including the US and Japan. To respond to changing demands, Google is “rolling out new, smartphone-optimized ad formats that give users more reason to tap than its traditional AdWords. These include picture-heavy automobile ads that show users a gallery of their dream ride before directing them to dealerships, and hotel ads that sandwich together availability, prices, user reviews, and pictures into a compact mobile format.”

However, while the amount of mobile access might be outstripping desktop, an Outbrain study in the Asia-Pacific region shows that people consuming content on desktop are much more likely to engage with content compared to mobile, especially when it comes to paid content, reports Trak.in.

“In fact, if we compare desktop vs mobile, then engagement level falls drastically to 36% in Australia; and 9% in India. This means that if an Indian accesses a piece of content on mobile, then there is 9% less chance of his engagement compared to accessing content on desktop. Engagement here means sharing, commenting, liking the post or following the author/publication on social media.”

Of course mobile and desktop are both heavily used to access email. Yesware Enterprise examined more than 14 million messages sent by its users earlier this year to produce a detailed pattern of when and on what device people use to read their emails. This slideshow gives an insight into their findings.

According to Brady, it’s less about what you cover in your community and more about how you cover it that matters. Digital media need to build relationships with their audience and understand the issues that are important to them, then provide them with information they need to take decisions about their lives. It’s not about telling people how to think or what to do, but about giving them the tools they need to make their communities better in whatever way they choose. Future digital audiences won’t be satisfied with just being told what has happened and don’t want a diet of pure “accountability journalism” – “it’s the relationship with the local reader that will determine success or failure”.

News organisations should also remember that they are no longer the only voice in their community and use it to their advantage. Social media like Twitter and Facebook understand that people want other information sources and link out to other sites, and this makes them more attractive, not less. “How many of the top 100 papers in the country actively link to other media or citizen sites in their communities? Not many.”

As for what makes a successful online news operation, Brady doesn’t pretend that there’s a simple formula and doesn’t underestimate the scale of the challenge. It’s undeniable that audiences and revenues are moving away from legacy – all you can do is make sure you’re built for a digital future: find newsroom and sales staff who understand digital and reward them for it.

One thing that successful digital news sites do have in common is “a willingness to try something new, whether it’s a laser focus on a specific community, an interesting membership model or a major events business. Honestly, I don’t know that the traditional model of hiring a lot of reporters and just writing stories will ever work for a local digital news site.”

Mobile is now the most important platform to watch. “The move to mobile is happening at lightning speed, and there’s no sign it’ll slow down. And, to me, the key to mobile for local sites will be location.” Local media have to take advantage of the fact that they know exactly where their users are and what they care about – this is critical for providing the best coverage and the most relevant advertising.

World Newspaper Congress

There were five key takeaways: constant innovation (‘think like a startup’); blending tech, content and development; collaboration (‘why go it alone?’); mobile; leveraging technology and data.

The five takeaways are all driven by one “simple” fact: the digital transition. Speaker after speaker “gave pleas, encouragement and warnings to their colleagues about the urgency of today’s publishing environment”.

As George Nimeh, Chief Digital Officer for Kurier in Austria, put it: “If you don’t start every day by thinking about your digital journey, you are in deep trouble.”

Constant innovation

“Innovation is day-to-day business,” said Thiago Madeiros Ribeiro, Digital Product Manager of Brazil’s RBS Media Group. Newspapers must break away from the assembly-line approach. Instead they need to make it possible for staff with different skills to come together to solve problems and get new products to market.

“The days of launching a product, letting it just sit there, and then moving on to another product are over. Everything needs to be tested, evaluated, developed and refined… constantly.”

Blending tech, content and development

Publishers need to blend tech, content and development. Tech isn’t an end in itself, it’s the means of telling a better story. Developers have to be at the same table as developers. Newspapers need to involve developers and designers in the news meetings and strategy discussions – “they are just as much storytellers as journalists are”.

Collaboration

To prosper, the media industry has to be as good at collaboration as it is at competition.

“Whether it be mobile, video, analytics, the upcoming onslaught of wearables, etc., it’s obvious that collaboration and partnerships are a key part of any publisher’s digital strategy, particularly when going up against goliaths and especially if you are a smaller publisher.” Collaborating enables publishers to access skills they don’t possess in-house, while at the same time saving costs.

“Although we often say that small and nimble is better, most of us are about as nimble as a big cargo ship.”

Mobile

In the current environment, mobile is first, last and everything in between. Partnerships are essential if you’re to succeed in that format – news publishers aren’t mobile companies and app development talent can only be found in specialist companies. Focus on what you do best and collaborate to do the rest.

“If you want to figure out social, then you have to figure out mobile. If you want to figure out video, you have to figure out mobile.”

Leveraging data

Data ‘oils’ the digital news business. You need to collect and analyse as much relevant data as you can to get the best out of your products and services. But for most it still has only potential value. “The actual monetisation of data is a much more involved process even after the not-insignificant work of collecting it.”

World Editors Forum

Key themes of the editors’ meeting were: the ongoing transformation of the newsroom; the impact of Edward Snowden; press freedom; video; pushing the boundaries of globalised journalism and digital journalism.

Ongoing transformation of the newsroom

“Stories under 500 words do well. Stories longer than 800 words work well. And in the middle there’s a deadzone.” – Gabriel Kahn, Professor of Professional Practice; Co-Director, Media, Economics and Entrepreneurship; Director, Future of Journalism at the Annenberg Innovation Lab, USA

“We still get people saying ‘we should hold this for print’ and I say ‘why not just throw it in the trash?’ Convergence is the only way forward. You cannot keep print and digital separate. It won’t work, not even in developing contexts.” – David Callaway.

Press Freedom

“This Golden Pen [of Freedom award] …materializes the support and shows that he is not forgotten. That he is one of us. That an attack on one journalist is an attack on us all and that jailing a journalist is a crime against humanity.” – Swedish journalist Martin Schibbye, accepting the 2014 Golden Pen of Freedom, the annual press freedom prize of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), on behalf of imprisoned Ethiopian publisher, journalist and blogger Eskinder Nega.

National security, liberty, regulation and the role of a free press in the post-Snowden era

“It’s created a very real chilling effect among our sources. They’ve become nervous about talking with us. They don’t want their phone numbers associated with us. And government employees who previously routinely talked to us, now won’t.” – Gary Pruitt, President & CEO, The Associated Press, USA.

“Journalism may have to be moved ‘off shore” to avoid creeping surveillance” – Janine Gibson, Editor-in-Chief, theguardian.com and Deputy Editor of Guardian News and Media, UK.

Pushing the boundaries of global journalism and digital journalism

“I believe we are at the beginning of a major movement in cross-border, collaborative investigative journalism.” – Rosental Alves, Professor, Knight Chair of Journalism, University of Texas, Austin, USA.

“Geography in the newsroom is the most important: having coders, designers, product people in the same room.” – Aron Pilhofer.

“Consistent revenue comes from a combination of both short, sharp video and long, evergreen content.” – Marie-Noëlle Vallès, Head of Video, AFP, France.

“Younger generations are increasingly interested in news but increasingly cynical about sources of news.” – Jason Mojica, Editor-in-Chief, Vice News, USA.

World Advertising Forum

The trends that have been shaping the industry in recent years show no sign of slowing, though digital revenues from tables are encouraging. The key takeaways were: print is in decline, but still the main source of revenue; accountability, ROI essential; new ways of measuring impact; programmatic may save digital advertising; and tablets offering good yield.

Print in decline, but still the main source of revenue

“The real money in newspapers is still in print – digital is our future, but it is a future not yet realised.” The situation isn’t helped by the fact that “advertising fatigue” is growing, with more people turning to ad blockers for browsers, mobile and TV.

Accountability, ROI becoming essential

Today’s advertisers expect return-on-investment (ROI) and a much higher level of accountability than in the past. Businesses are buying into ROI, and it is increasingly governing decisions.

New ways of measuring impact

The industry needs to look at new ways of measuring its impact. “We need to stop thinking in terms of how many people read us every day and focus on how many people we influence every day”.

Programmatic is saving digital advertising

Programmatic advertising isn’t a passing phase, “it’s very much a stable part of the digital ecosystem”. “It’s no longer a question of should publishers get involved with programmatic, but how do we get involved?”

Tablets offering very good yield

“Tablet advertising is giving a very, very good yield. That is something that is similar to print in giving good value for us,” with tablets showing responses of up to 40 times higher than online ads.

He told The Drum that buzzwords like ‘mobile-first’ have become ‘meaningless’: “If you think about mobile first you are thinking of a specific-point solution, which is only one way of dealing with your audience, and if you start to think about it too much you forget about the other pieces.”

Instead of obsessing about specific platforms, the FT follows a ‘universal publishing’ strategy, making content available across the multiplatform landscape.

The Arab region accounts for 6% of the world’s mobile connections. This may not sound like much, but dig a little deeper and you can see that the region has had a remarkable mobile decade – with connections growing at more than 32% a year for the past 10 years.

Research by Deloitte for the GSMA has revealed that by the end of 2012 there were 391 million mobile connections across the Arab states. Just ten years ago that figure stood at 19 million. The only region where mobile connections have grown at a faster rate during that period is sub-Saharan Africa.

Looking ahead, these trends are expected to continue, not least because two-thirds of the MENA population is under the age of 30. Young and increasingly tech savvy, the Arab Digital Generation may be leading the way, but take up of mobile technology is starting to cut across all demographics.

The good news for media organisations is that “news and feeds” apps are popular amongst the region’s mobile smartphone users, but it is essential for news organisations to understand that there is no one-size-fits-all solution in developing a mobile strategy, as use varies widely not just across this diverse region but also within countries.

One region, many markets

Like other developing markets, although the MENA region has experienced dramatic mobile growth in the past decade, the picture is more complex than headline statistics suggest. Not only are there huge variations between urban and rural populations within countries, on a regional level large, wealthy countries’ usage distorts the region’s mobile figures.

Much of this complexity stems from the fact that, despite many shared linguistic and religious characteristics, the Arab world is far from homogenous. In particular, there are considerable socio-economic differences between the Gulf countries in the Middle East and the Arabic (and French) speaking nations of North Africa.

These differences – which include household incomes and employment levels – also manifest themselves very clearly in the adoption of new technology. The region is polarised between countries such as Saudi Arabia which enjoys a mobile penetration rate of 209% – and a smartphone penetration level of 54% – and South Sudan where mobile penetration is just 22%.

Recognising that the Middle East is not a single market but many different markets is an important starting point for news outlets. What works in one country, may not work in another for a number of reasons including connectivity, competition and context.

Another factor which can skew our understanding of the region is the dominance of Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Collectively they account for 40% of all mobile connections in the Arab world, as well as some of the region’s largest online and offline populations. Egypt alone represents 20% of the MENA population, whilst Saudi Arabia  – with an internet population of 8.5m – has an internet universe 17 times larger than that of nearby Oman.

Given this, it is not surprising that these two countries heavily influence markets for content consumption and social media activity.

In the social sphere, as the Dubai School of Government’s 5th Arab Social Media Report  showed, usage of Twitter in the Middle East is dominated by Saudi Arabia. With 1.9 million active users in March 2013, it dwarfs its nearest rival (Egypt, with 519,000 active Twitter users).

Conversely, Egypt dominates MENA’s usage of Facebook.  Of the 54.5 million active Facebook users in the region, over a quarter are in Egypt. With just 16% of Egypt’s population on Facebook, there is plenty of room for growth too.

For news organisations looking to develop mobile strategies, they will want to make sure not to rely on regional statistics but the most up-to-date information about their own countries.

Deciphering mobile behaviours

Although there is an increasingly rich seam of data about mobile take-up in the Middle East, understanding what users do with this technology is harder to ascertain. Nonetheless, we can establish some characteristics about mobile behaviours in the region. The most striking of which is the volume of mobile usage.

Research by Northwestern University in Qatar concluded that MENA residents are online for 17 hours a week  through wireless devices.  How this time is spent is unknown, but anecdotally chat apps, social networking and gaming are all popular pastimes. Given that users spend 2-4 hours a day on social networks, it is likely that much of this activity is undertaken on mobile devices.

Q: How much time per week do you use the Internet through wireless handheld device(s)?
BASE: Internet and Wireless Hand-held Device Users
Base with selected filters: 5177

Much of this activity is on Facebook, which is used by 94% of social network users. This is followed by 51% on Twitter and 45% on Google+. These findings offer further clues for news providers about where they should focus their social presence and the extent of the potential social opportunity.

Alongside Northwestern’s study, new data from Ipsos MORI offers further insights into the online habits of users across 6 MENA countries (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, UAE, Lebanon and Kuwait).

Of particular interest to news businesses is the finding that amongst smartphone users, “news and feeds” is the top category for app downloads across four of the six countries they surveyed (see slide 22).

This is good news for providers such as LBCI News, Alarabiya and BBC Arabic – all of whom have produced a range of mobile apps – although these figures do need to be treated with some caution, as downloaded apps do not necessarily translate into use and some of these smartphone markets are still quite small.  In Egypt, for example, just 5% of the total population own a smartphone, against overall mobile penetration of 105%, and in Jordan this figure is 19%, compared to 143% total mobile penetration.  Nonetheless, it will be interesting to see whether “news and feeds” remains the top download category in these countries as smartphone adoption grows.

A further encouraging statistic from Ipsos lies in the role played by the web as the primary platform for daily news consumption amongst internet users. This finding was reinforced by Northwestern’s study, which reported that 49% of internet users in the region used the web daily for local, national or international news.

As with social networking activity, it is not clear how much of this daily news consumption is undertaken using mobile devices. However, given the high levels of mobile web browsing in the region, it is likely that much is through wireless devices.

The GSMA notes:

Due to the limited coverage of fixed-line networks and the associated cost of computers, mobiles are quickly becoming the main platform for internet browsing. Eleven countries in the region rank above the world average in mobile web browsing.

In countries such as Sudan, mobile browsing accounts for 45% all internet activity, followed by Libya, Oman and Kuwait at around 25%. This is compared with a global average of 10%.

Of course, as we noted with desktop digital media, consumers are often ahead of advertisers. You will need to evaluate not only the consumer appetite but also the business opportunity as you determine how to stage your strategy.

Further Implications

Whilst we need to undertake further research into what content mobile users are consuming, these statistics should provide encouragement for news providers. On the horizon, content providers should also consider these three developments which may shape their editorial vision and portfolio:

4G and Video

4G is a reality in some Middle East countries and about 167 m videos are viewed every day on YouTube across the region. As with Twitter this is a network where Saudi Arabia leads the way. With 90 m video views every day, Saudi Arabia enjoys the highest number of YouTube views in the world per internet user. And although most YouTube consumption is typically through a desktop, this is not the case in Saudi Arabia where 50% of these views are on mobile devices.

Across the region mobile video consumption is only likely to increase, particularly as LTE networks expand. Cisco’s Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast, argues that the Middle East and Africa will be the fastest growing region for mobile data, with a growth rate of 77% CAGR between 2012 and 2017. Globally, Cisco estimates that by 2017 video will account for two-thirds of the world’s mobile data.

Managing technological divides

Alongside the roll-out of 4G networks and an increased penetration of smartphones, content providers must continue to be mindful of digital divides. Outside of cities, for example, fixed line connectivity is often quite low. Mobile broadband may therefore be the only way for some rural audiences to enjoy online content.

For feature phone users, SMS based news and information may remain popular for some time, especially if smartphone adoption in the region fails to exceed 40-50% in the next five years as Ericsson’s 2013 mobility report  suggests.

What’s interesting about this prediction is that some MENA countries already exceed this level of adoption.  Nielsen  noted in 2012 that Qatar has a 75% penetration of smartphones, a figure higher than the total mobile penetration of some Arab countries.

As Northwestern University in Qatar recently noted across the region there is:

…a genuine digital divide, between the four wealthy Gulf states – Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE – and those that do not share such abundance – Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Tunisia. The digital divide demarcates technological abilities in the Arab world about as starkly as anywhere on earth.

Content providers therefore may wish to consider repurposing their output to reflect these technological realities. Basic technologies such as SMS and FM radio continue to sit alongside more sophisticated mobile technology such as 4G, and to reach the largest possible audience, news organisations will want to serve both high-tech and lower-tech audiences. Ideas submitted to the annual Knight News Challenge offer some suggested ways forward, as do some of the strategies employed by Al Jazeera. The network simulcast their English service on FM radio in Doha, and to reach US audiences which might not be able to watch Al Jazeera English on cable or satellite networks due to lack of carriage, the channel offers US audiences a telephone number they can call so that they can listen to it on their phone.

Media literacy

Finally news providers also have a role in promoting participation in news discourse and its consumption. With the technology increasingly in place across the region for audiences to consume content via a mobile device, publishers may need to encourage this adoption by educating audiences on how to do this. Western broadcasters such as the BBC have used promotional campaigns and presenter endorsements to promote Video on Demand and other online services for some time.  As with some of the other ideas in this article this is arguably something Middle Eastern media could do more of.

The good news for news providers is that high mobile penetration levels, coupled with a strong interest in news  – as well as the popularity of mobile browsing and social networking – mean that the building blocks to create a mobile audience are already in place. By harnessing the creative potential of these platforms and promoting their services to a wider range of users, then digital news in the Middle East can move forward to the next stage in its evolution.

For most news organisations, the response to the mobile revolution will be one of distribution, but Cory Bergman, the General Manager of mobile-first news service Breaking News, says that the mobile revolution is about more than distribution. Distributing your content to mobile audiences is a challenge easily met, but media are only starting to grapple with the business challenges. Writing for the Poynter Institute, Bergman said:

The mobile revolution isn’t about design and distribution as much as it is about revenue disruption. … Both Craigslist and Google created new business models enabled by the technology and scale of the Internet. In the same way, mobile is enabling new business models and use cases. Just like the mid- to late 1990s, we’re at the leading edge of the ensuing disruption.

He believes that mobile payments and geolocation, the ability of phones to customise advertising and content based on a user’s location, could disrupt local advertising. “For local media organizations, that has the potential to destroy your business,” he adds.

This disruption is not far off, he says, and he points to the moment where mobile internet use will surpass desktop. If anything, the developing world is ahead of the developed world in this respect. As we’ve pointed out several times here at Knowledge Bridge, for many internet users in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, mobile internet access is people’s sole way of accessing the internet. In many countries, mobile will dominate, rather than the desktop internet.

This isn’t just about differences in distribution channels. Just as importantly, there are dramatic differences between the business of the mobile and desktop internet. As Bergman says:

There’s a huge gap in advertising yield between desktop and mobile experiences: $3.50 versus $0.75 in average CPMs, according to Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker. Mobile is growing so quickly, the explosion in available inventory is depressing advertising rates.  Ad agencies typically lag demand, which means this gap won’t be bridged anytime soon.

Bergman’s worry is that news organisations’ response to the mobile web will be similar to that of the desktop web: that with such low advertising margins, it would be too easy to focus the business on the desktop web, even though this would ignore a growing segment of the audience.

However, as the news industry is realising with the desktop web, simply applying advertising and revenue models from traditional media to digital media isn’t proving to be successful. The same holds true for mobile media, and the strategies that worked for monetising desktop audiences will not be the same strategies required to monetise mobile audiences. It will take creative thinking both in terms of content and commercial teams to come up with appropriate and successful strategies for mobile.

To develop these successful strategies, Bergman suggests that news organisations consider how the mobile experience differs from the desktop internet. “Mobile is not merely another form factor, but an entirely new ecosystem that rewards utility,” he said. News organisations need to consider how to tap into the high level of social media use on mobile, the opportunities of location both for targeted advertising and targeted content and also the increasing use of mobile payments as potential ways to build this utility and the commercial activity needed to support their mobile efforts.

Last year alone mobile data traffic almost doubled, and the volume of mobile data traffic was 61 times larger in 2012 than it was five years earlier, according to a report by US networking company Cisco.

The report is packed with similarly staggering figures that highlight the growth of mobile data, including a prediction that by the end of this year, the number of mobile connected devices will exceed the world’s population.

The report provides not just these-attention grabbing global figures, but also regional and in some cases national figures that will help publishers and editors at news organisations make decisions about how to reach their rapidly expanding mobile audiences.

Explosive growth in the next five years

The report, The Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Forecast (PDF) , gives a sense of just how rapid the growth in mobile data will be over the next five years. It draws on a number of sources including Informa Telecoms and Media, Strategy Analytics, Infonetics, Ovum, Gartner, IDC, Dell’Oro, Synergy, ACG Research, Nielsen, comScore, Arbitron Mobile, Maravedis and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

The global figures predict global data usage in 2017 with growth rates so fast that the figures truly are mind boggling:

• Mobile data traffic will grow almost three times faster than fixed line traffic.
• By 2017, global mobile data volume will increase by 771 times from what it was just 10 years before. This means in 2017 mobile data traffic will be the “equivalent of 2,789 million DVDs each month or 30,742 million text messages each second”.
• Data use from Android devices is now higher than that of iPhones.

Diving into the details of the report, there are a few things that are important to note: Cisco includes not only data over traditional mobile networks but also data using WiFi. In fact, the amount of data over WiFi is dramatically higher than that over mobile networks.

Also, the global figures themselves already seem staggering, but when you focus on specific regions or countries, the predictions of growth seem even more astonishing. Some highlights from the the report include:

• Africa and the Middle East will see incredible growth in mobile data between 2007 and 2017, with mobile data traffic growing 3405 times in that decade, the report predicts. By 2017, there will be almost 850 m mobile users in the region, up from 661 m in 2012.
• From Central and Eastern Europe including Russia, mobile data speeds more than tripled last year to 551 kbps.
• “In Latin America, 67.7 million devices were added to the mobile network in 2012,” the report says. However, that is just half of Africa, where 144.7 m devices were added to the network.
• In the Asia-Pacific region, which includes Asian giants India and China, some 385.5 m devices were added to the network, just in 2012.
• For all the talk about smartphones, basic handsets still make up the vast majority of devices on the network, accounting for 82 percent.

The value in this report for news organisations outside of North America and Western Europe is this richness of regional and even major country data. To see highlights for your region, Cisco has created a website that allows you to find the statistics by region as well as by major countries in the regions. I will say this: the major countries in each region do tend to skew the data for these types of reports when it comes to digital media usage.

What does this mean for news organisations?

As a company that sells networking equipment, it’s in Cisco’s interest to make these numbers look large, but the multiple sources of data that Cisco uses are credible. The company estimates that, if anything, its estimates have erred on the conservative side by 2 to 10 percent.

The bigger question is why this information is relevant to news organisations. We all know that the mobile revolution has arrived, and it is sweeping across the globe. Publishers and editors need to know how to respond to the ways their audiences are using mobile devices by understanding:

• What devices are they using? How many are using smartphones? How many are using basic phones?
• Are tablet users a significant part of your audience?
• Are they using WiFi, 3G or 4G?

For example, in Africa, parts of Asia and Latin America, digital means mobile. As we noted last year, in countries like Egypt, Bangladesh, Senegal and Brazil, the majority of internet users are mobile-only internet users.

This will mean that not only will publishers need to understand how to deliver their content to these mobile audiences, but they also will need to develop revenue models that will support this expansion of mobile. Monetising mobile audiences is a key strategic goal for many digital media companies, and, while early in its development, there are mobile advertising strategies such as better targeting – both of the customer and the customer’s location – that are proving successful. In addition to advertising, mobile audiences are more willing to pay for apps and information. Mobile payment systems also make it easier for users to purchase things using mobile devices, opening up opportunities not only for paid content but also m-commerce.

Cisco’s report shows that mobile use has exploded past the elite, early-adopter phase and is rapidly moving into the mainstream. It’s another platform, with its own unique challenges, but also its own unique opportunities. Almost regardless of where you are in the world, if you don’t have a mobile strategy, you’ll want to develop one this year.

I thought that (digital) was being presented as a panacea, that everything would be fine, that information would be democratised, that it would it level the playing field. As you know, it hasn’t happened, and it is not a panacea.

He felt that before you put a computer in a school, you should put a roof on the school or instead pay for textbooks or motivated teachers. Before we talk about telemedicine, let’s have electricity first.

However, he had a Damascene digital conversion, literally, on a mountain top. He had a mobile phone with a camera that had been given to him, and he took a picture of a beautiful lake with mountains in the background. He was able to send the photo from a really remote area of Nepal worldwide at the push of a button.

I said, ‘Wow!’. This is really the tool that can magnify audiences that can spread your reach, so I saw the power of internet and online media through that instant.

The technology empowers people by giving them access to information especially in countries like Nepal where the diaspora is 15 percent of the population. It allows people in Nepal to reach beyond national boundaries to relatives and friends who are living all across the world.

That becomes the tool for traditional media to extend our reach. Smartphones are still a very small percentage of mobile phones around the world, but as the cost of smartphones drops, he believes that they will create a real revolution in media reach. “That is coming, and we have to be ready for it,” he said.

In a piece looking forward to journalism in 2013, Raju Narisetti, the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network, said:

“Mobile first” should become a newsroom mantra, as 30–50 percent of all digital news content consumption of most newsrooms shifts to mobile devices.

Independent media require financial viability

At Media Development Loan Fund’s Media Forum 2012, Dixit said that for media to be truly independent, it needs to be financially viable. Mobile definitely offers the opportunity for media to extend its reach, but as far as helping media financially, “it’s not happening yet,” he said. It’s starting to happen in developed countries and China, but there is not enough revenue to be generated through phones and the internet for traditional media companies like his. But he added:

But it is coming. We have to be ready for it. We have to be ahead of the curve.

To keep ahead of the curve, he keeps reminding staff that it is still about the content. “If you have fabulous content that is original, investigative, relevant, in-depth, then no matter what delivery mechanism you use, it will spread,” he said, adding:

Why not combine great delivery with great content? That is the winning formula.

The wider reach of digital content will eventually win over advertisers, Dixit said. Digital content also delivers a range of new opportunities for publishers and advertisers including multimedia and dynamic content, as well as revenue opportunities such as e-commerce.

To achieve financial viability while reaching new digital audiences, news organisations will need as much business innovation as editorial innovation. They will need to compete with new digital entrants that specialise in targeted digital advertising. Digital advertising is not just about reaching the masses but knowing a lot about those masses to deliver relevant content and relevant advertising.

As we wrote about recently here on Knowledge Bridge, there are a lot of ways to generate revenue with digital content and digital services. Digital media doesn’t just change content and how we deliver it, it also changes how we pay for that content. The shift to digital requires new business thinking just as much, if not more than, it requires new editorial thinking.