With an emphasis as much on innovation as building traffic, Reuters is often at the head of its field in developing new mobile ideas. Within days of the latest iPhone appearing in stores, Reuters released a new web application designed specifically for Apple’s touchscreen interface and optimized for video and picture slideshows.
When Reuters initially launched its U.S. mobile site in the United States in 2005, it already had years of experience to fall back on, having launched similar sites in Europe and Asia at the beginning of the Millennium.
Indeed, its U.S. site was very similar to its European and Asian cousins and, according to Reuters’ Global Director of Mobile Products Joe Cohen, it has changed little in the past three years.
The site itself looks very basic compared to, say, CNN or The New York Times mobile sites. And it loads extremely quickly, thanks largely to a lack of images and less text than most of its competitors.
Cohen says speed is one of the guiding principles behind the site. He calls mobile “the haiku of the Internet,” and says load time is probably the most underrated feature of a mobile site.
“It pays to be very light and very efficient,” he says.
The simplicity of Reuters’ site is due in large part to an additional guiding design principle of Cohen’s—to be "platform agnostic." The company only uses technologies that are compatible with all phones, such as WAP, XHTML and SMS, so that all cell phone users can access the main areas of the site.
"It's easy to forget that when AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile or Sprint have promotions for some less expensive Sanyo, Samsung, LG, or Nokia phones, they are really popular," says Cohen. "They sell out very quickly".
Indeed, Cohen says the “tail” for mobile handsets and browsers is very long, with market leaders Windows Mobile, RIM and Apple’s iPhone only accounting for about 30 percent of Reuters mobile’s millions of monthly page views.
Designed for Functionality
But developing an attractive product for such a wide variety of phones, with varying download speeds, resolutions, screen heights and widths, does not mean that the average user experience must be dragged down, says Cohen.
Rather, Reuters employs a taxonomy on functionality and design. Web servers detect which handsets are accessing the site and offer an experience to match. So, readers with phones that support video are offered video stories and cell phones with larger screens display more headlines. Reuters iPhone optimized site launched a site optimized for the latest iPhone within a week of its release (http://www.apple.com/webapps/news/reuters.html).
Although the presentation of Reuters mobile site is largely the same as when it launched three years ago, Cohen says Reuters has been able to add a number of additional functions such as the currency calculator, video clips, broader search features and stock quote charts.
The most recent addition to the site is a function that “suggests” news stories when users search for stock quotes. So, for example, if a mobile reader enters a company name or stock symbol, such as “GOOG,” the resulting page displays Google’s stock quote along with links to the latest news and other articles relating to the firm.
Cohen says the function has significantly increased site traffic, particularly on Mondays and Tuesdays. (The “oddly enough” and “entertainment” sections of the site see a rise in traffic at the tail end of the week.)
As Google and Yahoo become increasingly important drivers of traffic to the mobile site, Reuters has started to look more closely at search engine optimization for its mobile site.
“There was a time when one of the carriers was our leading provider of traffic,” says Cohen. “And now it is Google. We’ve spent a lot of time working on having our markup as easy as possible for Google to read, as well as doing everything we can to make the site incredibly search friendly.”
Reuters Mobile Labs
As Cohen and his team work on the site, they are occasionally fed additional applications by Reuters Labs, a tiny department within Reuters’ U.S. division, currently numbering three full-time employees, whose mission it is to dream up, build and experiment with prototypes for new products.
While Cohen’s team has page view and revenue targets, Reuters Labs is under no pressure to generate earnings for the company. Rather, Reuters Labs exists to experiment. Many of its products never see the light of day. And if they do work they are passed to other departments for development and sale to clients.
Nic Fulton, chief scientist at Reuters media division, says that a key feature of Reuters Labs is that it carries out its research in public, developing applications for social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, and opening up its text, image and video data to developers. The whole idea is to take risks and to gather feedback from the community.
Reuters Labs has not worked on any mobile applications in 2008, but last year Reuters Mobile Labs released two products: an enhanced mobile service utilizing Flash Lite, and a mobile journalism experiment that allowed Reuters journalists to post video reports from the field using their cell phone. Fulton says both projects were a success.
The enhanced mobile site was developed after working closely with Nokia and their E-series phones, which come with Flash Lite pre-installed. Fulton says Flash Lite allows Reuters to publish a more visually rich site, with lots of animation and images, while maintaining a relatively low drain on bandwidth. “It looks pretty slick,” says Fulton. “It doesn’t feel like a web site any more, and it gives a much richer presentation of the content.” (To view a sample on a PC see http://labs.reuters.com/desktopmobile.)
Meanwhile, Reuters’ mobile journalism project experimented by using the cell phone as an input device. Reporters were equipped with Nokia’s N-95 cell phone and filed photographs and candid video from a range of events, such as the 2008 Presidential Campaign trail and New York Fashion Week. (To view a sample of the mobile journalism project see http://reutersmojo.com.)
Currently, Fulton says Reuters Labs is not working on specific mobile applications. But he says that, in general, Reuters has its eye on the Blackberry because it ties in neatly with Reuters’ interest in the business professional market. The “ultimate iPhone app” is also a perennial contender for development, he adds.
Other possible future ideas include utilizing the moveable aspect of the cell phone—being able to twist or turn it—and the increasing prevalence of touch screens, to develop new ways of traversing the screen and turning pages, possibly by rotating, shaking or brushing over the phone.
Mapping the Future
Looking to the future, Fulton sees countless opportunities for utilizing GPS.
One possibility could be what he describes as “citizen journalism in reverse.” If readers give newspapers permission to track their movements using GPS, editors could contact people via SMS if they happen to be near a breaking story like a building collapse, and could ask if they witnessed, photographed or recorded the incident.
Fulton says such a system could have the greatest impact in authoritarian societies where the press faces greater restrictions.
“Imagine the inability of oppressive governments to stop everyday people being eyewitnesses for the rest of the world,” says Fulton. “It would be like ‘Tiananmen Square live’—from people in the Square not filmed from a building across from it.”
Another, more lucrative opportunity for mobile news sites and GPS, according to Fulton, is hyper-local advertising. “Imagine if the advert that you are looking at against your news was telling you that right behind you is a Starbucks,” he says. “It could include a message saying, ‘Don’t you feel thirsty? Why don’t you get a coffee? Oh, and by the way, here’s 50 cents off.’”
He adds: “Mobile is often treated by media organizations as a nice add-on to the Web site or the 24-hour news channel. But it might be that the mobile product is the highest margin, most profitable thing that there is in the long run, because the advertising could be so much more valuable than anything they currently offer.”
“It might be that the mobile product is the highest margin, most profitable thing that there is in the long run, because the advertising could be so much more valuable than anything they currently offer.”
Because of its position as a global wire service that concentrates on national and international stories, Reuters will not be as well positioned to serve local news on mobile. But, Fulton says, it is an enormous opportunity that local newspapers could be letting slip by as they continue to be consumed by their core Web site.
“I think the Web has turned out to be some sort of weird distraction,” says Fulton. “A lot of papers seem to have become obsessed with page views and total user numbers. They are saying, ‘look we have circulation of 100,000 but on the Web we have got a million unique users.’
“The problem is that those unique users are no longer their original community. They are people from outside who have been driven there by search engines. Newspapers are forgetting that what they really own are the hearts and minds of their community. And I think mobile could really help them continue to own that community.”
Paul Berger is a British freelance journalist based in Brooklyn, N.Y. More...