Mobile Mondays

Monday, 10/19/2015

AJC’s mobile team ( @MelroseGibson and @EricaAlyssa) round-up this week’s top mobile journalism stories from around the world.

1. Get AMP’d: Here’s what publishers need to know about Google’s new plan to speed up your website via  @NiemanLab 

Erica: I’m going to be 100 percent honest here and say most of this article kind of confused me, it’s a DEEP dive into what AMP means for publishers. As a content producer, I care about how my content loads and looks on mobile. My takeaways from this: AMP has the potential to do great things for mobile load times (something the mobile internet desperately needs) but it also could have very real drawbacks when it comes to the kinds of content that can be published. I still have many many questions about how AMP will be implemented and actually work.

Melanie: As a mobile product manager who is always worrying about the speed of her product, I think this is a great idea. I’d love to see how fast my sites would be using AMP HTML. However, there are two things that would make me hesitant to use it.  

First, this would take away some of the control that we have over our design and the quality of our photos and video. Second, there isn’t a revenue share option for publishers like with Apple New and Facebook Instant Articles. I’d be interested in learning more about the ad networks supported by AMP. If they line up with our current ad network strategy, I think this could be worth looking in to more. 

Ultimately, I think this would take a lot of time and resources to implement. Using AMP would mean giving up a lot of control when it comes to our mobile site. I think Joshua Benton expresses exactly how I feel about AMP toward the end of his article: “You’re trading in open web standards for something built by Google engineers who, despite what I don’t doubt are the best of intentions, have incentives that don’t line up perfectly with yours. And you’re becoming an disempowered actor in a larger Silicon Valley battle over ad tech.”

2. Snapchat To Shut Down Snap Channel, Laying Off Team, Changing Content Plans via @Deadline

Erica: Reading about Snapchat is a passion of mine, almost as much as sending my own Snaps. I truly believe Snapchat could change the way the next generation consumes news. I think Snapchat is the next iteration of meeting your audience where they are (mobile, social, Snapchat). But to get specific on this story, Snapchat shutting down its own discover channel doesn’t surprise me and actually makes a lot of sense to me. Snap stories from specific locations it Snapchat’s place to shine. Like we’re seeing on most mobile traffic, hyper local content preforms better. The Atlanta Snap story is a must-watch for most Atlanta Snapchat users, not the national Snapchat discover story that’s hidden in an different page. 

Melanie: Fail fast, fail often. I think that the Snap Channel was a cool idea, but I quickly forgot about it after it launched. Hey, I was really busy looking at snaps of my friend’s canine companions. I feel for everyone who was laid off and I hope they are able to find new positions quickly!

3. 5 reasons to pay attention to the young people in your newsroom via  @Poynter

Erica: I think I may be the youngest if not one of the youngest people in our newsroom at 22 and four months, and I could not agree more with everything in this post. Millennials get such a bad reputation in most all workplaces but I fell like this especially rings true in newsroom where there has been so much disruption in the past decade. The reporters who have lived through it all are skeptical, and with reason, but debunking the lazy, no good, after-my-job millennial stereotype is one of our greatest challenges as a generation right now and it’s refreshing to see some good press working towards that goal.

Melanie: At 25, I am not the youngest person in the newsroom or audience departments and I think that is pretty great. I love that our departments at the AJC are really diverse. What I loved about this piece was that it highlighted the good things about millennials instead of talking about why millennials are the worst. The third and fifth points resonated with me the most. We’re really adaptable and we’re ready to learn. I have a feeling people are really going to like us…someday.

That’s all folks.

Monday, 9/7/2015

AJC’s mobile team (@anasantosphoto and @ericaalyssa) round-up this week’s top mobile journalism stories from around the world.

1. Newsonomics: Why native apps still matter in the Age of Distribution via  @NiemanLab

Erica: “So does the mobile browser = like and the app = love?” -- this was what stuck out to me the most in this story. For me as a user, that equation rings true. But as someone who works to create mobile content for both our app and mobile site, I feel like both audiences should and can find something to love. I don’t think there’s that like/love divide. I do, however, see that intimacy that’s referred to in the app user’s experience. We get countless emails about how to make our app better from our app users. Whether it’s setting up a vacation mode to silence our push alerts or making a feature to increase text size, app users feel more ownership over their in-app experience. That, to me, is a great sign for the future of news apps. 

2.  Periscope, by the Numbers via @Medium 

Erica: Periscope’s 10 millions users are watching 40 years of video a day AND they reached this feat in four short months. These stats alone are worth noting to anyone who wants to understand mobile audience. Mobile users adapt to new trends and tech quickly. By this point, news organizations should be ahead of this user learning curve. Who could have guessed when Periscope launched back in March that it would be at this peak already? 

This post is data and vocabulary heavy and it doesn’t delve into the bigger question: How did this happen? 

But it’s still worth noting: Periscope and its 10 million users are here to stay.

3.  Why We’re Jealous of Chinese Smartphones via @WSJ

Erica: China seems to have cracked the operating system code as far as creating apps that work on your iPhone and on your friend’s Android. As much as we’d like to think everyone has an iPhone, that’s not true. We consistently see our audience split fairly evenly between operating systems yet most apps aren’t available to all. While the news apps world seems to fit into all operating systems, I can’t help but wonder if we’re really making sure every operating system gets the same high quality user experience? 

And finally: a 360-degree virtual reality show created strictly for mobile view? I think we’ve seen the future folks!

That’s all folks.

Snapchat experiment, continued

By Erica A. Hernandez, Mobile Reporting Specialist for the AJC (@EricaAlyssa)

The seventh-annual Red State Gathering was held in Atlanta Aug. 7-8 and I was a part of a team of more than 10 AJC reporters, photographers and editors who were on hand to cover the event. We were expecting about 10 republican presidential candidates to speak at the event, which began the morning after the first GOP debate. With more than 900 people in attendance, we knew it would be a big engagement moment for us. So in a collaboration with the AJC’s audience and politics team, I snapchatted the event from the AJC’s official Snapchat account (AJCnews).  

Here is the result from day one:

The goal here was to make sure to get every candidate from that day into the story along with behind the scenes peeks and commentary from our talented political team, that was on site, churning out lots of content all day. 

Day 2 we we’re expecting Donald Trump to close out the event but that all changed when the host of the event, Erick Erickson, dis-invited Trump for comments he made about journalist Megyn Kelly on CNN.

This change of plans turned the RedState Gathering into the hub of Trump news, though Trump was nowhere to be found.

Day 2 results:

With the help of the social team sharing updates on various channels (Twitter, Facebook) our Snapchat audience saw a good amount of growth in followers and engagement on both days. 

By Ana Santos, Mobile Content Producer for the AJC (@anasantosphoto)

This week, the AJC had an article about tuition rising (again) for Georgia colleges. There was an opportunity to target different audiences so the social promotion was personalized for the students and alum from each school.

This is example of our general Twitter post using our quotable tool:

Then we optimized Twitter posts targeting major schools with the biggest tuition increases, including Georgia State University, Georgia Gwinnett College, Georgia Tech and UGA. Our first tweet had no customization.

The goal was to get more users to click through to our links or get the same users to click through multiple times. Here is an example of how customized tweets engaged the audience:

I know it’s a general understanding that people who comment don’t always read the article, but this shows specifying UGA as the topic drew a lot of attention from a niche group of followers.

The result: The day of the experiment, the story Tuition has risen again for Georgia colleges was among the top 15 most-viewed stories on myajc.com. Twitter drove over one-third of the traffic.

Monday, 8/3/2015

AJC’s mobile team (@anasantosphoto and @ericaalyssa) roundup this week’s top mobile journalism stories from around the world. 

1. How Al Jazeera’s AJ+ Became One of the Biggest Video Publishers on Facebook via @Variety

Ana: Al Jazeera’s start-up AJ+ is truly audience-first, with their audience being Facebook video consumers. Short, quick visuals-first videos with high sharing potential go far on Facebook. But does it matter how many people AJ+ is reaching if there is no monetization? It’s gotten to the point that Facebook is too big to fail for publishers, including AJ+. If Facebook is half of AJ+’s audience, what will they be without Facebook?

Erica: I believe once you see an AJ+ video it’s hard not to like them. It’s true, the company isn’t very well known. It flew in under the radar and started flooding our social feeds with top notch video content -- which makes it all the more cool. Tailoring the content to the Facebook audience is what I believe made the difference for AJ+. The text heavy, topical, short explainers are made to watch, not listen to and that’s exactly why they get so many views. But Ana’s point is valid: what’s a Facebook view really worth? There have been some talks of introducing Facebook distributed advertisements into video plays and sharing revenue with the video producer. I would be interested to see how this plays out for AJ+.

2. Vertical video via @mashable: Cronut inventor's new desserts will tickle your memories

Ana: Professionals used to make fun of vertical video, saying things like “who forgot to turn the camera sideways” or “vertical videos are the worst.” Now are those same professionals thinking differently? Mashable seems to be experimenting with vertical videos on layouts. And it works on mobile! An exciting experimentation into digital video. I can’t wait to see what happens.

Erica: I was drawn to this story this morning for two reasons: No. 1 CRONUTS, No. 2 Snapchat really has stuck with vertical images and videos so I’m glad to see that trend is spreading outside of the app. Vertical video make sense for mobile. It’s how we hold and use our phone. It’s the most natural user experience and yes it can somewhat compromise the artistic view of the story a reporter is trying to tell or maybe it doesn’t have to? I think Mashable put together a great vertical video and fully used all the space in every shot and angle they showed.  

3. A new mobile ad report shows that while you probably start your day with social, news app users are loyal via @OMediaworks

Ana: This article introduced to me the idea of a “first” and a “last” app. “Here, we sought to identify the most common first “app of the day,” or the first app users access when they wake up in the morning, and last app of the day, which would be the last app accessed.” The most common “last” app is a news app, which is also the app with the most loyal users.I know when I wake up every day, I check Twitter and Facebook for trending this morning or breaking overnight news. But when I go to bed, I find myself scrolling through NYT Now or listening to NPR One. People keep talking about the diminishing relevance of news apps, but news apps done well can really capture and hold an audience.

Erica: I too had never really focused on the idea of a last app. Obviously capitalizing on being someone’s first app of the day is a big goal of many news app developers. But It seems social is more dominant in the early mornings hours. I admit that Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram are first on my morning routine after email. But being a last app can have just as much, if not more, of an impact on our audience.

Another important point made here is how the mobile audience traffic is dominated by android, though monetization isn’t. Is it worth spending more of our resources to cater to a device specific audience?

That’s all folks.

Monday, 7/27/2015

AJC’s mobile team (@anasantosphoto and @ericaalyssa) round-up this week’s top mobile journalism stories from around the world.

1. The rise of the mobile editor via Poynter

Ana: Mobile devices have fundamentally changed the way audiences interact with information, media and news. The way our audience interacts with mobile devices is different than the way they interact with desktop or print. Therefore, the publishing and presentation strategy has to be different, and there has to be someone who maps that strategy out.

There has to be someone in the newsroom who consciously thinks about mobile-first and helps bring the rest of the publication down that route. Dr. Garcia says “mobile success is about a collaborative effort involving storytelling, design, technology, user-experience and advertising.” Mobile-first is the responsibility of everyone, but “the presence of the mobile editor as key.”

Erica: While reading this story I just kept hearing “YAAAAAAS” over and over in my head. It was dead on with what a mobile editor is and why it’s needed. I just wish we had gotten a little more insight as to how these positions function in the newsrooms that were mentioned, but that just because I wanted to compare and contrast it to what Ana and I do as mobile producers and reporters. One of the more important lines, beyond defining the role is conveying why it is so crucial. No sentence accomplishes this more than: “The mobile editor, even if confined to a mobile silo, needs to have enough gravitas and authority to be able to convince the newsroom that mobile is our recent present, our current, and our future, and that a majority of humanity will increasingly live more of their lives on mobile.” YAAAAAS!

2. The New York Times’ “Summer of Science” aims to make science journalism mobile-friendly and fun via Nieman Labs

Ana: How do you get people interested in science? How do you translate academic studies with complicated facts and figures and sometimes vague real-life implications into an everyday must-read? The NYT took an audience-first approach, focusing on high school students. The answer, not surprising to many, was a mobile-first design with content optimized for social media.

I disagree with Sam Dolnick, a senior editor for mobile at the Times, when mobile-first content means minimalist content. I do not think content for mobile devices should be shorter for the sake of being shorter. That’s assuming mobile audiences only want to skim and have short attention spans. A mobile audience is just a digital audience on a mobile device. Not all wired users want longform pieces, why would mobile audiences want only shorter content? You have to take content customization on a case-by-case basis, putting audience first.

Erica: First off I have to say I’m so eager to see how this goes for the Times and hope we get an end-of-the-project update at some point. Secondly, this is a great idea and what makes the concept and execution of this so sound is that they realize the mobile audience is the social audience too, the overlap there is too great to ignore. So the project isn’t just about designing and creating mobile-friendly content it doing that for content that is highly shareable. Mobile and social’s overlap is something that we need to continue to learn about in order to fully capitalize on it, and this project could help further that understanding. 

3. Millennials No Less Trusting (or Distrusting) of News Sources via Pew Research Center

Ana: I will admit I am the typical millennial… according to this Pew Research study on trust and distrust in different media organizations based on generations. My parents just don’t get why I love The Daily Show! NPR is doing a great job of gathering a young and diverse audience, as is the Washington Post and NYT. This study is interesting to me, because being good as social media or being mobile-first doesn’t automatically make a news organization trustworthy.  There are more things at work than just a tech-savvy team.

Erica: It’s hard to talk about the impact of mobile and social channels on content metrics without discussion millennials. Yes, millennials are another key component to this equation as they are arguably the high mobile-using demographic. This study showed millennials are just a little bit more trusting of media than the generations that came before them (about 3 to 4 percent more trust media, to be exact). This is good news for our mobile efforts. Our native mobile audience trusts us now it’s just a matter of getting them to see our content and enjoy the experience while view it (see articles 1 and 2 above). 

That’s all folks. 

Monday, 7/14/2015

AJC’s mobile team (@anasantosphoto and @ericaalyssa) round-up this week’s top mobile journalism stories from around the world.

1.  Snapchat Redesign Puts Spotlight on ‘Discover’ News Portal via the Wall Street Journal 

Ana: Millennials love Snapchat, but let's admit it: Discover is easy to forget. Less than 2 million of Snapchat's daily 100 million users look at Discover, according to this article. Snapchat seems to want to change that, by putting Discover right above our friends in the Stories section. 

I immediately noticed the change when I opened Snapchat. But will this user experience update result in more clicks for publishers like National Geographic and Vice? If visits don't dramatically increase with this new design, Snapchat just isn't the media publishing powerhouse it's cracked up to be.

Erica: I first saw this update as I was logging into our newsroom’s snapchat, an eye catching difference but not so alarming as all the content and information presented to me was the same -- it was just organized differently. Ana and I had been discussing the usefulness in having a newsroom Snapchat account with a few of the AJC interns last week and all of them came to the realization that they like the content presented in the “Discover” page but they just don’t go to it unless they’re “really bored.” I completely agree. Before it was too easy to forget about, but this update and redesign changes all of that.

2.  Reinventing Google for a Mobile World via the New York Times

Ana: You don't need a fancy study to show you how mobile devices affect information sharing and consumption. The way I operate on a desktop is different than the way I operate on a mobile device. Google Search's power is diminishing and "whoever figures out what questions people really want to ask their phones while they are walking around, and how they will ask those questions” will hit the jackpot, according to this article. Search is a huge part of my mobile experience, but I don't always Google it. 

When I want to look up a recipe, I Pinterest it. When I want news, I Twitter it. When I want recommendations on salons and restaurants, I Yelp it. When I look for things to do, I Facebook it. Sometimes Google Search may not have all the answers I'm asking while I'm on the go.

Erica: The parallels to the obstacles Google is facing as a search engine and we’re facing as a news provider are vast. Google is seeing more traffic driven from mobile devices and so are we. Google, however, is seeing a lot of the traffic it is losing from desktop searches moving to app searches in iTunes’ app store (which it practically dominates). We, on the other hand, are waiting to see our app’s numbers pick and regain that gap in users.  

3.  How mobile metrics fall short for news outlets and advertisers via International Journalist’s Network

Ana: What is the value of a page view or a visit, at least according to advertisers? I would think the modern advertising in the digital age would be easier and more precise than advertising in the non-Internet era. It is much easier to target people by location, interest and income now than ever. But can we agree on the value of a visit? Are all visits equal? It seems as things get clearer, they also get more complicated.

In an effort to grow our Snapchat audience, I snapped live from arguably Atlanta’s largest weekend event: the Atlanta Street Food Festival in Piedmont Park. 

Here is a look at the final product. Each individual snap was viewed about 70 times, a big jump from around 20 times at last weekend’s AJC Peachtree Road Race.

AJCnews’ Snapcat story from Saturdat July 4, 2015 AJC Peachtree Road Race. 

There’s no arguing Snapchat is here to stay but the question now facing us at the AJC and reporters at media outlets across America is how do we engage our audience on this somewhat mystifying medium?

The AJC has had a Snapchat account for some time (follow us at AJCnews) but no one has really put much effort into pushing content out through it or growing our specific audience on it. With that in mind, I wanted to experiment with live event coverage via Snapchat during one of Atlanta’s biggest events, the AJC Peachtree Road Race.

The Goal

As a mobile reporting specialist, I was already positioned to be at the finish line on race day gather quick hit videos, stories and photos. The idea being this content could be turned around and pushed out on social very quickly to engage our mobile audience whom were either at the race cheering others on, running the race or just following race updates from home.

With that goal in mind it seemed like a very natural progression to add Snapchat to my coverage plan. The audience we were looking to reach would likely be on Snapchat more than they’d be on our homepage (like most mobile visitors to our site).

Snappin’ Away on Race Day 

I set out on race day at 6 am to catch the MARTA to the finish line. Once I got off at midtown, I saw the station was flooded with racers trying to stay dry on their commute to the starting line. I knew I wanted to tell that story but I wanted to show a sense of place since this wasn’t obviously race related.

After a few attempts of getting a shot inside the MARTA stop, I pointed the camera out toward the rainy street scene and got a much better result.

I wanted to show more than just the women’s and men’s winner crossing the finish line. That kind of news is not what Snapchat users would expect on that platform. They are looking for more interesting, sometimes funny photos and videos that show them a little slice of something they’re experiencing or something they wish they were experiencing.

Like Instagram, breaking news on Snapchat isn’t going to perform too well, but compelling images and vibrant scenes will.

My goal for this experiment was not only to test what works and flex my Snapchat muscles, but I also wanted to see if the thirst for Snapchat content was there. Since we aren’t regularly posting content to Snapchat yet we aren’t campaigning hard to grow awareness of our account. But I forwarded a screen shot to our social media manager on-call on race day and asked him to tweet it out to encourage people to follow us.

He did.

It’s important that he included that photo because it gave our audience a peak of the kind of content they’d be signing up for – we were not and would not tweet out a call to action for a blind follow.

The Results

In one day the AJCnews Snapchat account jumped from 19 followers to 34 followers with just that one tweet from the main AJC account.

My final product ended up being less than 200 seconds long and feature five photos and six video clips.

(Watch full Snapchat story here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-71dJhbJX4)

In a world where social referrals to mobile rule, any new social connections to our audience can be beneficial and is worth exploring. Here’s hoping Snapchat becomes a natural part of our mobile and visuals daily work flow.

The White House won on Twitter with its #LoveWins animated graphic that showed the history of gay marriage in the U.S.

#LoveWins. pic.twitter.com/s5aiwIsFz8

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) June 26, 2015

Today is a big step in our march toward equality. Gay and lesbian couples now have the right to marry, just like anyone else. #LoveWins

— President Obama (@POTUS) June 26, 2015

TIME magazine showed the power of quotables with a simple but powerful line that sums up the SCOTUS same-sex decision.

Supreme Court says same-sex couples have right to marry in all 50 states http://t.co/x9SaFg52KP pic.twitter.com/6fU8abBvUI

— TIME.com (@TIME) June 26, 2015

AJC political reporter Greg Bluestein was at a Georgia courthouse when couples started rolling in to apply for marriage licenses. Georgia banned gay marriage in 2004.

The second same-sex couple to legally wed at Fulton County courthouse fills out paperwork while choking up. #gapol pic.twitter.com/FwRXvn7Q9F

— Greg Bluestein (@bluestein) June 26, 2015

Never underestimate the power of a map.

Map: Where gay Americans can now marry http://t.co/SPxAigMO4L pic.twitter.com/MSsoNDGD0X

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) June 26, 2015

Vox’s Ezra Klein reflected on how much eleven years can make a difference.

If you had told me in 2004 that America would have a black president, universal health care, and gay marriage by 2015, I would have laughed

— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) June 26, 2015

The last paragraph of the SCOTUS ruling went viral and many media organizations, including Vox and Buzzfeed, picked it up and displayed it on Twitter like this.

Justice Kennedy's closing paragraph. pic.twitter.com/V3jZbFPAUg

— Matt Ford (@fordm) June 26, 2015

Other people made comparisons to other current events, such as the debate on finally eliminating Confederate flags from the South Carolina State House and other places in the U.S.

Here's a gif for you, America. You fucking earned it this week: pic.twitter.com/OrfVsJauxe

— Ben Rosen (@Rosen) June 26, 2015

what a week pic.twitter.com/V3pLCz0H8g

— Jonah Green (@jonah_green) June 26, 2015

MARRIAGE EQUALITY IN ALL STATES & WE'RE TAKING DOWN CONFEDERATE FLAGS 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 https://t.co/m1JdXWTStT

— king corv (@IsaiahSmith311) June 26, 2015

This week was a pretty spectacular week for SCOTUS decisions.

Dang, universal healthcare AND gay marriage in America by 2015 pic.twitter.com/tVou0FXMDM

I formatted a blog post, "End chronic homelessness," which were two opinion articles posted on the MyAJC site that were posted on one blog post. My goal was to format this blog post to make the articles look better for a mobile screen. Here is the before and after of what I did.

Before

The text of the story was unedited in terms of formatting. Besides the bolding of the title and byline, not much else seemed to be formatted on this blog post. I thought it should be made obvious to the reader where one opinion piece started and the other ended.

An optimization of AJC's Buzz blog's Honey Boo Boo family now living in metro Atlanta, covering how to organize lots of aggregated content and embeds in a blog post.

While threading and optimizing content for mobile this week, I looked at "Jon Stewart’s top 5 greatest Georgia politics hits" on the AJC politics blog. Jon Stewart had announced he was leaving The Daily Show, so AJC Washington reporter Daniel Malloy did a round-up on the top clips where Georgia was mentioned criticized made complete fun of.

I did some tweaking of the title, experimented with iframes for mobile and played with the power of lists.

Top stories, articles and keynote speakers from the February 2-15 news:rewired conference that would benefit mobile journalists and newsroom producers.

5 essential tips for great visual storytelling (journalism.co.uk)

How to utilize visuals to "accompany a great piece of writing or reportage" featuring lessons learned from the visual storytelling session of digital journalism conference news:rewired.

Also read As it happened: Keynote from Aron Pilhofer, where the Guardian’s executive editor for digital talks about how mobile functionality is key.

How Snapchat became a global force for news media and entertainment consumption

A collection of links to all the stories and articles you will ever need to understand Snapchat and utilize Snapchat Discover for news.

FEBRUARY 2015

All the significant mobile/social media news for journalists this month.