Wireless,
at Version 1.0
by Lisa Rabasca
Publishers whose newspapers have mastered the Internet are eyeing the next big thing–wireless content delivery of news anywhere, anytime.
The catch: In the wireless world, someone else’s technology delivers your product. The customer signs up with the cellular carrier, not the newspaper, and the user pays by the minute or the byte. So how will newspapers make money providing content to wireless devices when most haven’t yet profited from the World Wide Web?
Content developers, including newspaper representatives, shared their experiences at the late-winter Internet World Wireless 2001 Conference in New York City.
Publishers, like managers of every other medium, are struggling to find the killer application that will make newspapers the destination of choice on the wireless map. The road is rocky: No one guarantees an application will work on every device because there’s no standard programming language, browser or appliance.
“We are in the 1.0 world of wireless,” said Frank Greco, chief executive officer of Crossroads Technology Inc. “All of these devices are throwaways and will be useless.”
Wireless is not about surfing the Web, as many carriers have suggested, said Greco. It’s about accessing relevant data when and where it’s needed, and that information is parceled out in small, digestible bites.
“There are unique issues such as smaller screen space and the need for simple navigation,” said Brian Chin, senior online producer for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “The content can be deep, but the navigation must be shallow.”
The Post-Intelligencer launched PImobile last year, allowing users to access real-time information through an Internet-enabled cellular telephone. So far, Chin said, concise, easy-to-scan data–such as a schedule of local sporting events–has worked best.
Unlike Internet developers who talk about creating a “sticky” Web site that users will spend time searching, wireless developers can’t expect mobile users to surf. “We interpret ‘sticky’ as users coming back to the site throughout the day,” said Anurag Mendhekar, director of products and technology for Yahoo! Everywhere. “If you give users what they want, they will come back.”
And if users return to your site throughout the day, how much content should reside on the network and how much should be cached locally on the device? Because of the time and expense of accessing the data repeatedly, “it’s not that useful to always go to the network,” said Nish Bhutani, senior vice president and group publisher of content and community for CNET Networks Inc. of New York City.
Bhutani argued that carriers should share revenue with content providers, particularly because most major carriers restrict advertising and commerce. For instance, the newspapers that appear on the front screen of Sprint PCS sign a contract saying they won’t sell any advertising. They also pay Sprint a fee to be on that front screen. Don Addington, manager of mobile commerce for Travelocity.com, urged newspapers to negotiate aggressively.
“Go with a win-win now,” he advised, “rather than a lose-win now and a win-win later. Don’t give it all to carriers.”
Content providers with niche products should market themselves directly to customers to get them to demand that carriers add their service, Bhutani said.
New York Times Digital believes time- and location-sensitive products represent newspapers’ best opportunity. Last September, it began offering Web-enabled wireless users headlines and abstracts along with some soft news–The New York Times Best Sellers list, book and movie reviews, and trivia. The company has experienced good sign-up rates, says Nisa Lewites, formerly director of strategy and business development.
The next step, she says, is to offer subscription-based alerts for real estate, allowing subscribers to register housing preferences and be notified when properties matching their desires go on the market. The paper is also considering a subscription-based food and wine matcher that would help users decide what to buy while in a restaurant or grocery store.
“We’ve grown up with an Internet where everything is free,
but I expect less resistance [to paying] in the phone environment because
we’re used to paying a phone bill,” said Lewites. “If the
application is compelling enough, people will realize content isn’t
free. After all, people pay for newspapers.” 
Rabasca is TechNews’ associate editor. E-mail, rabal@naa.org.
DJ’s XML Donation
Dow Jones & Co. has long reported the daily machinations of the stock market. Now it’s contributing to a new standard for delivering those ups and downs.
The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition has used a self-developed XML variant called Market Data Markup Language for more than two years. Along with serving as a content-markup tool for posting market data to the WSJIE’s World Wide Web site, MDML serves as a common interchange format with other Dow Jones entities and such outside services as Factiva, a joint venture with Reuters.
“Dow Jones is both a consumer and supplier of market information, and XML is a powerful new way of exchanging data,” said Bill Godfrey, DJ’s chief technology officer. “Creating a standard, open framework enabling data to stream across company boundaries and multiple platforms will benefit the entire financial industry.”
Much as news organizations worked together to develop the News Industry
Text Format and NewsML standards (TechNews,
September/October 2000, p. 22), the Software & Information Industry
Association’s Financial Information Services Division (www.fisd.net)
has developed a working group to coordinate XML efforts across the market-data
industry. It’s also working with a variety of other organizations
to develop the broader Extensible Business Reporting Language, or XBRL
(www.xbrl.org), which will include
Document Type Definitions for corporate earnings, regulatory filings and
similar information. MDML will serve as one “technological cornerstone”
for the project, said Michael Atkin, FISD’s vice president.
KnightRidder.com’s
Open-Source Tool
By Tom Di Nome
After KnightRidder.com of San Jose realized it needed a content-publishing system that would give its editors and production staffers more flexibility in building, changing and maintaining online content, it did a little shopping around. But the company ultimately adopted a do-it-yourself approach, developing the Cofax Web-based multimedia publication system.
Originally built by the company’s Philadelphia data center, Cofax has become a cornerstone of KnightRidder. com’s efforts to merge its Real Cities network of newspaper and regional Web sites onto a single platform (TechNews, January/February 2001, p. 20). Short for “Content Object Factory,” Cofax offers an easy-to-use Web interface allowing editors to concentrate on editing rather than “cutting and pasting.” Unlike static HTML documents, Cofax dynamically updates content across multiple sites.
Cofax is significant because it was developed using the open-source approach and the Java programming language. Open source allows programmers to read, modify and redistribute source code. That helps software evolve and improve, argue backers of the nonprofit Open Source Initiative (www.opensource.org).
That’s exactly what KnightRidder.com had in mind. “If you don’t develop such tools in an open-source model, you end up having a proprietary, closed system that you need to replace,” says Rajiv Pant, vice president of technology development for KnightRidder.com.
“Most open-source products don’t have a [limited] shelf life because so many people support them,” Pant says. “Everybody gets to understand how the system works. It also makes it more attractive for other newspapers to embrace the system because they know that they’re not tied to just the few people who built it.” Pant says several newspapers outside Knight Ridder are interested in adopting Cofax.
The decision to go it alone was prompted in part by the difficulty of adapting commercial products, according to Pant. “An off-the-shelf product needs to be heavily configured to really work for a newspaper,” he says. “What we found was that with all the effort required to purchase something and configure it to meet all our needs, it was actually less work to build it ourselves.”
The development project was a broad collaboration, even by open-source standards. “In some ways, Cofax was not really built by the programmers,” Pant says. “It was built by the newsrooms. Even though they didn’t write any code, [they] really defined how it works.”
To learn more, visit www.cofax.org.
Di Nome is a Mamaroneck, N.Y., free-lancer.
E-mail, tdinome@earthlink.net.