These days, it’s almost sacrilege for news sites not to have a mobile presence.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 40 percent of adults use the internet, email or instant messaging on a mobile phone (up from the 32% of Americans who did this in 2009). But what’s a small news operation to do?

Some smaller organizations may not have the budget for developing a mobile site or app. While that excuse may not be valid for long, there’s one thing you can do if your organization lacks a mobile-specific site.

These rules look familiar

Follow the rules of building any solid website. As Stefan Nagey, a managing director at Qorvis, says: “When you’ve done things right, people won’t be sure if you’ve done anything at all.” Nagey presented “The Mobile Web is Dead” at a MeetUp event, hosted by the Web Content Mavens group in Washington, D.C. He also emphasized the importance of leaning toward developing an app rather than a mobile site since apps tend to be a richer, more popular experience for consumers.

Bur if you lack the funds for programming a mobile app, he relayed some good advice for creating any site, like:

• making sure your interface priorities match your business priorities.
• writing clean, semantically correct markup.
• creating SEO friendly content.
• designing a clean, simple user interface.

Use what he called a “light touch,” and your website will function well, even though it’s not officially mobile-ready.

What do you think? Should news orgs definitely be mobile ready?

Photo by sgback.

McPaper has never been a big part of my media diet. In print and online, even when traveling, I'm more of a Gray Lady type of guy. That said, USA Today arguably had a bigger influence on the industry I entered six years ago and my earliest impressions of it than any other single publication.

Founded the year I was born, USA Today pioneered the color photos, infographics, branded sections and quick-read news items that had spread to virtually every newspaper — even The Gray Lady — by the time I graduated from journalism school 22 years later. On a personal level, USA Today, which followed my twin brother and his kindergarten classmates for 13 years for its series on America's high school class of 2000, gave me my first inside look at the journalistic process.

How influential will The Nation's Newspaper be over the next quarter century, a span that will cover the prime of my journalism career, and, of greater concern to all of you, settle many — but probably not all — of the questions being asked now about the future of the industry? That remains to be seen. But the chances it will at least have a seat at the table were boosted last week when it announced, along with 130 layoffs, a major restructuring, effective immediately, from a print first to a digital first news organization.

Digital First. From the Christian Science Monitor's ending its weekday print edition, to, more recently, Allbritton Communications' new TBD local news website and the Journal Register Company's Ben Franklin Project and ideaLab, it's a term that's come up a lot lately. It's a concept legacy media organizations — admirably led by those listed above — have only recently started embracing in earnest. Yet, it's already a buzzword. Like "fair and balanced." Like "breaking news." Like, a subject for a future post, "interactive." No matter how many times you say it, merely calling it such doesn't make it such.

A way of operating, working and thinking

So, before we get too far into this, what, precisely, does it mean to be "digital first"?

I'll break the old journalists' rule and ask as much as I answer here. That itself — both breaking rules and asking questions — I'd proffer, is a big part of digital first. At the most basic level, digital first is this:

• It's a business model. This is the money part. Not surprisingly, it's the part that gets the most attention.

  A digital first business model recognizes that print and broadcast advertising revenue won't support news gathering over the long term. In pursuit of sustainability, it might do some radical things, like forgo short-term revenue opportunities, more closely coordinate editorial and business operations and charge consumers for online content. Like it or not, believe it or not, each is likely to be at least a small part of the new reality.

• It's a workflow. This gets its share of attention, but mostly in spaces like ours, where, you know, audiences appreciate that journalism doesn't just materialize and that those who create it are human beings with hearts, minds and, yes, even souls.

  A digital first workflow recognizes that the process is becoming the product. It leverages new methods for finding, assembling and sharing stories, methods that sometimes can perform all three functions at once.

• It's a mindset. This gets the least amount of attention. And that's a shame. While the other two components are resource-dependent, everyone possesses the necessary equipment to start putting this one into action right away.

  A digital first mindset recognizes that with the static Web, social Web and mobile Web all coming of age during the lives of this fall's college freshmen, change is the only constant. What digital encompasses and therefore what must come first can change at a moment's notice. This means being proactive not reactive. It means not being afraid of problems and not getting too attached to solutions.

For more about USA Today's transition, we recommend checking out the newspaper's internal slide presentation and Ken Doctor's blog post for an overview, then heading to the Gannett Blog and BNET's Catharine P. Taylor's column for some criticism.

For more about digital first in general, this June piece from the Strange Attractor blog, Jeff Jarvis' January interview with Journal Register Company CEO John Paton and TBD's Steve Buttry's series of mobile first posts are all good reads.

What do you think of USA Today's restructuring? What does digital first mean to you?

Modified Creative Commons photo by Flickr user clevercupcakes.

Anna Tarkov knows how to create thought-provoking content. A quick glance at her Twitter page offers up gems like this:

“Wow, this CSI: NY dialogue is AWFUL. Is this show still making new episodes?”

Followed by: “Also... An extremely straight service guy told me hats are coming back. He said he saw a segment about that on TV. #Igiveuponthemedia!”

Witty, yes, but that’s only half the story. Besides entertaining her 5,500-plus Twitter followers, the journalist also regularly comments on the evolution and future of news. She started a regular series on her site called “What Do News Consumers Really Think?” — aimed at raising and answering questions about how people’s news habits continue to change amid a content-filled world. Tarkov has conducted eight interviews so far, posting the first back in June. She's picked the brains of young and older news consumers, each with their own unique insights.

She admits that her sample and questions are unscientific, but her ongoing articles provide interesting insights nonetheless. The idea to peg news consumers with questions, in hopes of receiving answers, seems so profound, yet simple. We turned the table on her, and asked a few questions of our own, after being so intrigued by her series of interviews. What follows is a condensed version of our e-mail interview. To find the longer version, head over to my Scribd account. Our questions are in bold.

How did you get the idea to start the interviews?

I wrote [in her first post of the series]: "I found my first interviewee, Bob Meinig, on Twitter. He replied to something I posted and that got the discussion going. It then moved to e-mail and that's when I came up with the weekly series idea."

To expand on that, the exchange with Bob was when it suddenly dawned on me that myself and other media geeks were probably not the only ones with opinions about journalism and the news. Having attended countless conferences and panel discussions on journalism in crisis, I began to realize that the opinions of "regular people" were what was most sorely needed. Like you said, it's an idea that's so simple and yes so profound all at the same time.

What have you learned from the series?

What I've learned from the series so far can somewhat be found in my comments inside the interviews themselves. To sum up, I've learned that, for instance, educated, intellectually curious people are very media savvy and are all amateur media critics like me. I realize of course that it's not exactly a scientific sample since I find most of my interviewees through Twitter which is a virtual media cocktail party. However, I think these people are representative of a larger population (spanning all age groups) which is technologically advanced, analytic, etc. These people are not passive consumers of anything, including their news.

...It's apparent that people are looking for deeper analysis of the daily news, especially from newspapers.

Other insights so far are that it's apparent that people are looking for deeper analysis of the daily news, especially from newspapers. They are increasingly getting the breaking, "hot off the presses" stuff online and when (and if) they read a newspaper (even online) they are looking for context and insight that they can't find elsewhere. The last part is crucial. People are looking for unique content they can't find anywhere else and too many news outlets are giving them the same thing with no added value.

You bring up the point that you know your approach is unscientific. However, it still has provided valuable feedback for anyone in the news business or anyone interested in how media consumption has evolved. What ways do you think media organizations can capture the same sort of insight?

Absolutely my approach is unscientific. So far all of my interviewees have come from Twitter. So these are folks who are already pretty plugged in digitally, are bloggers in some cases, etc. But the fascinating thing for me has been the similarities among them despite their ages ranging from 23 to 66. They've also ranged in income level, geographic location, occupation and other factors. So while this is an entirely unscientific sample, I think it gives a great snapshot. What's most important, and what I keep stressing in every interview, is how much I believe that the people I'm talking to are the ones publishers need to woo. These people are intellectually curious, voracious consumers of media and they have the financial means to support it with either their spending on advertisers or directly paying for content.

You mention that news consumers want more original content, especially from their local news organizations. However, the focus on breaking news and quick-hit stories seems to be a cultural thing for many news operations. How do you think journalists and newsroom leaders can turn that around?

First off, I think people want original content at both the local and national levels. Heck, everyone on the Internet wants original content, right? Who wants to read something they've already seen in 10 other places? I would argue that original content is pretty much second nature at the local level (who else will care about something in, say, a Chicago suburb other than the media there?) It is at the national level where news agencies are often duplicating one another without adding much value to a story or taking a fresh angle on it. What I think a lot of "old media" people don't understand is that the web values uniqueness and it also rewards it. I wrote an open letter to the Washington Post ombudsman that touches on these points.

How I think media organizations can capture the same insight is by basically to do what I'm doing within their newsrooms. A great example is the Chicago Tribune's TribNation blog. I happen to know James Janega, the reporter who runs it, and I think he's doing a phenomenal job. In conversations with a few other Trib staffers I learned what was already obvious to me: that when they planned to launch TribNation, they took extreme care to choose someone who would be really committed to its success and was the right person for the job.

If you look through the blog, you'll see why I like the effort. The posts are done not only by James, but by many other reporters in the newsroom. They invite people into their stories and ask them what they think. They ask for ideas and suggestions. There are often polls. They hold in-person meetups, from big social ones to small ones focused on specific issues where people can talk directly with reporters and editors. They talk about new editorial features, both in print and online. The best thing is that the dialog is at a fairly high level.

No gimmicky silliness that you see so often in the way media orgs relate to their audience, but serious, straight talk. This goes a long way towards humanizing a large media organization that can seem, from the outside, very impersonal and monolithic. Finally, what this is working towards and, I think, accomplishing is creating the transparent newsroom of the future. Transparency breeds loyalty and respect, especially for news organizations who are trying to hold other people to account. If they are not themselves trying to be transparent, it's very hypocritical.

Every news organization, no matter its size, should be able to mount a similar effort. If a full-time person can't be allocated for this, then everyone needs to pitch in to make it happen. And of course reporters must themselves be available and open to conversation with their readers whether it's over e-mail, on social networks, etc.

Republishing of stories done by another news agency without adding anything of value needs to stop.

To expand on this a bit more, news organizations of all sizes need to take national stories and contextualize them for the people in their town, city or region. This happens to some degree already, but I believe it needs to happen a great deal more. Republishing of stories done by another news agency without adding anything of value needs to stop. When news organizations do that, they devalue and erode their brand. An analogy I can think of involves food. People will keep going back to the same restaurant if they serve an amazing unique dish that no one else does, but you can get a cheeseburger almost anywhere so it's really difficult (but not impossible) to differentiate yourself if all you're giving people is cheeseburgers.

As far as turning around the breaking news model, I want to be clear here and say that breaking news is an important part of a newsroom's output and many people are indeed looking for that kind of content on, say, Twitter. What I think needs to happen is that other news content, everything that's NOT breaking, needs to be promoted a lot more. For instance, many news orgs' Twitter feeds are set to automatically spit out the breaking news stories. But are they also posting the meaty, longer pieces that are often great conversation starters? Are they posting all the updates to the breaking news story even? What I've been getting from my interviewees is that they're accustomed to the 24-7 news cycle, but not everything is a breaking story and news orgs need to recognize that. They also need to recognize that the same news junkies who love to follow breaking news also usually love enterprise journalism. Don't alienate these people by only giving them half of your content. These folks are either already or potentially your most loyal readers. Finally, when breaking news stories develop into something bigger, there should be some linkage between the breaking piece and the fully fleshed out story. That way a reader can follow the story's development. Every possible place the breaking story appears need to be updated with the full story. Some news orgs do this, some don't.

Many of your interviewees seem hungry for context, or greater understanding and insight into what they’re reading. What are some simple steps journalists can take to start providing more of it on their sites?

YES. This seems to be almost everyone's top complaint. And again, these are smart people who take the time to do research on their own so they are frustrated when they see inaccuracies or poor context in news reports. News orgs should be very concerned about this. If smart, curious people are unhappy with the level of detail, then imagine how others feel. Or worse yet, others may not even stop to think about the details and form many incorrect conclusions. I think of journalists as the great explainers, along with teachers for instance. It is our job and our duty to explain the world to our audience and explain it more than just superficially. So often I read a story and think, yes, but what does this mean? Why does it matter? Why should I care? How will this possibly affect my life? What can I take away from this? Of course this is complicated by the fact that journalists are often pressed for time and not experts in the fields on which they are reporting. That's all good and well, but don't pretend in the story like you understand an issue if you don't and make sure what you are reporting is an accurate characterization of a situation as much as possible. If you don't have all the information, be honest about that. Suggest further reading your audience can do to bone up on a subject and link to it if it's an online piece. If you talk to a scholar or scientist, maybe post the full transcript of the interview or the audio. If you have a very specific audience, enlist their help in accurately reporting on a topic that they might know about. Journalists might think offhand that this makes them look stupid and clueless, but what it actually does is make them seem human. Nobody knows everything about everything. Be upfront about that.

From a strategic business perspective, find out what sort of information is valuable to your audience (or an under-served audience out there) because that kind of content is what keeps people coming back.

From a strategic business perspective, find out what sort of information is valuable to your audience (or an under-served audience out there) because that kind of content is what keeps people coming back. Maybe you could even charge for it if it's truly something unique that can't be found elsewhere. The example that always comes to mind for me is Rich Miler's Capital Fax (which really started out as a fax). There's some free content as you can see, but many, many political insiders, lobbyists, etc. pay an annual subscription fee for Rich's reporting on the Illinois statehouse which is virtually unmatched by anyone else. This is critical information that people actually need in order to do their jobs well and they're willing to pay for it. Financial publications are another example of this. The reason they can get away with charging for content online is that, surprise, it's good, valuable content. If what you're doing can be easily replicated by dozens of others, people won't pay for it. So you see, context and detail is not just important from the standpoint of doing a good job informing people — it can be lucrative as well.

The Washington Post's Top Secret America series and The New York Times's, The Guardian's and Der Spiegel's Afghanistan war logs reports were remarkable for a number of reasons. Among them, Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter Sarah Cohen said, is that they're perhaps the first data-driven stories of such magnitude to be produced for a participatory Web audience first, and for a print audience second, instead of the other way around.

But the stories were stitched together in large part with 20th century technology, said Cohen, a former Post database editor. It took her old employer two years to build the database Top Secret America was based on. "It shouldn't take that long," Cohen said. The Guardian, meanwhile, said it received the 92,000 leaked documents from Wikileaks in a single Excel file, about 30,000 more than the ubiquitous spreadsheet program can handle, according to the newspaper. "If you're dealing with 92,000 documents," Cohen said, "the last place you want to be looking at them in is Excel."

It's not that practitioners are stupid or incompetent, Cohen hastened to say, it's that better tools aren't readily accessible. Changing that is Cohen's main charge as a Knight journalism professor at Duke University, a position she's held for a little over a year. Working out of the public policy school's DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, Cohen searches for ways technology can make investigative reporting easier and less expensive.

"We know there are going to be fewer boots on the ground, so let's see how we can make those boots more effective," Cohen said in a telephone interview with Journalism Lives last Thursday, the day the first tool born from her work at Duke, open-source desktop program TimeFlow, was released.

TimeFlow, developed by former IBM Many Eyes contributors Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, sorts and visualizes temporal data, helping journalists spot trends and relationships and lessening the time they spend rereading notes. Unlike similar tools, Cohen said, TimeFlow is "designed to work the way reporters work, not the way you want it to look in the end." For example, reporters can input ambiguous dates and change them to more specific ones later without confusing the software.

An alpha version of TimeFlow can be downloaded here.

Cohen, who remains on contract with the Post, said she intends to use TimeFlow and other tools she creates in her own reporting so that she can make the most of developers' time.

"If they don't work, there's no point in getting someone to make them easy," she said.

As she pursues future tools, Cohen is keeping an eye on disciplines facing challenges similar to the news industry's, such as education, government and medicine. The digitization of doctors' hand-written notes and the automatic transcription of government meetings are among the many efforts in other fields with obvious journalistic applications, Cohen said.

"I wanted to see if there were people dealing with the same things that we're dealing with more effectively and more efficiently," she said.

This is something we're interested in, too. While news organizations' reporters talk with experts from other industries every day, their superiors venture out of the publishing or broadcasting bubble much less frequently. This is a shame, especially when the social Web makes it so easy.

If there's one thing David and I learned working alongside artists, educators, entrepreneurs and other non-journalists in our graduate program, it's that professionals in disparate fields have a lot to learn from each other, especially when the rapid pace of technological change means experts are at once nowhere and potentially anywhere.

What do you think? What fields should journalists consult in order to improve theirs?