89 percent of the U.S. mobile population (144 million users) now access news and information via their mobile devices
The sooner we as an industry admit that Facebook and Google and Apple and Snapchat are running the tables on media innovation — mobile and video innovation — the sooner we’ll do something about it. The sooner we’ll take exponentially bigger, patient bets to solve real problems. The sooner we’ll embrace failure instead of saying we do, only to lay off the very teams who fail trying to invent our future. The sooner we’ll invest to recruit the best developers, designers and product leads, empowering them to break the “rules” and accomplish things we never imagined.
I spent five years working on a mobile news app — first as an editor helping curate and package content and then as a product manager shepherding it through a complex visual and technical redesign.
And here’s the #1 lesson from my experience: If you are a small or medium sized publisher don’t have a news app. If you already have one, shut it down. Use your resources to make your mobile web site better. Kudos to The Atavist for making this decision.
A corollary: When major publishers do niche apps (NYT Opinion etc), they lose their built-in scale and become the equivalent of a small publisher for that category.
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