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If all content is displayed in a linear, single column fashion (as is commonly the case on mobile devices) how do we establish a connection between an image and it's related content?

sarahmarshall3

In one of the sessions at DJ@DJ, a Wall Street Journal training course which I dropped into when I was at head office in New York last week, Neal Mann talked through developments in mobile at the Journal and beyond.

Mobile video

Neal, who is multimedia innovations editor (and @fieldproducer...

On Thursday, Dec. 12 I'll be hosting a one-hour webinar through Poynter's News University on changing workflow to create a mobile-first newsroom.

It costs $25 to attend and it's part of a great series of webinars called "The Essentials of Mobile Journalism. That series includes a webinar by Damon called "Mobile Metrics: Truths and Myths."

You get a discount if you buy the entire webinar series or just five of them.

Here's the description for the webinar I'm hosting this week. Hope you can make it!

With mobile traffic approaching or surpassing desktop traffic at many news organizations, it is time for newsrooms to make sure their cultures and workflows are set up to serve this growing audience. Just like the shift from print to Web or broadcast to Web, the shift to mobile requires thinking about the audience in a different way and making fundamental changes in how we cover the news.

WHAT WILL I LEARN:

Tools and devices to get your staff constantly looking at mobile

How to incorporate mobile into daily and long-term editorial planning and workflow

How to spot the ways mobile is different from desktop and act on them

How to create a culture that encourages mobile innovation

Staffing suggestions for creating a mobile first culture

WHO SHOULD TAKE THIS COURSE:

Who should attend this Webinar: Producers, reporters, editors, designers, newsroom leaders, product managers and anyone tasked with changing the culture and workflow of a newsroom or other organization to cater to the growing mobile audience.

#training

Being mobile first requires us to think about mobile as something different than just digital on a small screen. And it requires us to use all of the capabilities of smartphones to tell better stories and better serve readers. That is an organizational challenge as important as the original transition to the web.

Source: Kiesow.net

Good mobile news for hipsters everywhere

I have no idea what a hipster actually is, but I assume they drink coffee and ride bikes to work? The alternate headline could be, "The Internet of Things just called and will be here in 15 minutes."

BitLock Lets You Unlock Your Bike With a Smartphone

After a long day at work, the last thing you want to do is fumble to unlock your bike before commuting home. The BitLock makes unlocking much easier and faster by turning your smartphone into a virtual bike key.

An army of robot baristas could mean the end of Starbucks as we know it

Ever stood in line at a Starbucks or some other cafe and wondered why, in the year 2013, you can’t just send in your order 10 minutes early via an app on your phone, and pick it up as soon as you walk in? Briggo has such an app. It asks you to log in, so it can memorize your order and payment information, which enables one-click coffee ordering. Or you can order a coffee for a friend. And use the app to check out how long the wait is for a drink.

20 Tips to Turbocharge your Mobile Efforts

From an #ONA13 panel discussion with @etanowitz, @fionaspruill, @corybe, dkiesow

A PDF of the handout is here. The slides are up on Slideshare and you can watch the video of the presentation on ONA's site.

Get your newsroom looking at, and using, your mobile products

Get a live view of your mobile website on everyone's computer.

Set up app emulators on the big screens in your newsroom.

Work with your CMS team to get mobile preview in the publishing workflow.

Use an Apple TV and an iPad/iPhone to show your mobile products in daily meetings.

Download Reflector app so you can project mobile whenever needed.

Let the numbers make the case for the importance of mobile

Switch all your real-time monitoring to mobile first, desktop second.

Highlight the ways mobile consumption is different, act on them and share the results.

Remember that everything you share on social is predominantly mobile.

Pay close attention to metrics but don’t be a slave to current numbers. Sometimes an external trend is clear but your numbers don't yet tell the story.

Create a mobile-centric culture

Live like your audience. Force yourself to be mobile-only at home: phone in the AM, tablet in the PM. Don’t just use iPhone/iPads; get a WiFi-only Android to play with, too.

Take advantage of big news events and use them as catalysts to change the culture in your newsroom. They are stages for innovation and will help evangelize.

Build teams that are focused solely on mobile presentation, even if the teams are temporary and they are dispersed after the project/event.

Have the editors, producers and designers take a mobile-first approach when planning their coverage of a big news event. Look at mobile plans first.

Signs that your efforts are paying off

Your website is responsively designed and mobile traffic tops 50 percent.

Your executive editor/general manager/publisher uses your mobile products daily

You have newsroom and business leaders with ‘mobile’ in their title.

Planning starts with a discussion of mobile elements and presentation.

When the mobile site/app breaks at 2 a.m., people are woken up to get it fixed.

Your advertising team sells mobile-first. and commissions are tied to mobile.

Your CMS allows for different headlines and summary text on mobile, and you have an API that allows ‘data first’ development for future devices and partners.

#ona #mobile

How to Use an Apple TV and an iPad/iPhone to show your mobile products in daily meetings.

If your news organization has daily editorial meetings where your desktop website is projected onto a TV or screen and discussed, then you should also be showing your mobile platforms at these meetings.

Here's the set up we use at CNN to show our mobile website, iPhone app and iPad app at our daily editorial meetings.

What you will need

AppleTV ($100)

iPhone 4S or higher and/or iPad 2 or higher

If you are going to permanently leave an iPad or iPhone in the conference room, you should buy some kind of case or cable to lock it to the desk so nobody steals it. We use this Kensington SecureBack Security Case and Lock.

Once all the equipment is in place, just wirelessly mirror your iPad or iPhone screen to the AppleTV via AirPlay so you can show your apps and mobile website.

Photo showing the setup at CNN Digital's daily editorial meeting. The TV on the right shows the CNN iPad projected via an AppleTV

Besides projecting from the iPad chained to the desk, your colleagues can also do wirelessly mirroring from their own iOS devices as long as they are on the same Wi-Fi network as the AppleTV.

While this setup is for iOS only, I'm hopeful that Google will enable wireless mirroring from Android apps to Google Chromecast.

This tip was first presented as part of the “20 Tips to Turbocharge Your Mobile Efforts (Before It’s Too Late)” panel at the 2013 Online News Association Conference in Atlanta.

#20mobile #ona13 #how to

How to set up app emulators on the big screens in your newsroom.

The best way to see what's happening on your news organization's mobile app is actually to use it on a device.

But since lots of newsrooms like to project their metrics or desktop home pages onto big screens so everyone can see, here's a way to project your iPhone and iPad apps onto a big screen and have them run automatically so people sitting at their desks or passing by can see what's happening on your apps.

What you'll need

A Mac mini and an HDMI cable

A big screen TV or monitor with HDMI input (You may want to consider a vertical TV or monitor)

An iOS developer who can build this for you

At CNN we have two of these emulators, one running on a vertical monitor and another running on a regular HDTV.

Our emulators show our iPhone app and our iPad app. They open the home screen and slowly scroll up and down a few times so someone watching it can get a good idea of all the content inside the home section. You can set it to open up other sections if you want.

Our emulators also allow someone to use the computer's mouse to stop the automated loop and go to a specific story or section just like they would if they were using our app on a phone or an iPad.

I'm not a developer so I can't explain all of the details of how they were built, but I know that our developer used Xcode and iOS simulator to build it, and then terminal on the Mac to control it automatically.

Here's a video of one of our CNN emulators in action

This tip was first presented as part of the “20 Tips to Turbocharge Your Mobile Efforts (Before It’s Too Late)” panel at the 2013 Online News Association Conference in Atlanta.

#20mobile #how to #ona13

How to use the Reflector app so you can project mobile whenever needed

Don't walk, run to download the Reflector App on your Mac or PC.

This is the best $13 you will ever spend!

It's a program that lets you wirelessly project your iPhone or iPad to a Mac or PC. It works very similar to the AppleTV set up, but it's got a lot more features. For instance, you use it to record video of your app in action.

This is great for demos, use as b-roll on TV or just showing someone how your app works. At CNN, we used Reflector to show people how they could vote for the 2013 CNN Hero of the Year inside of the CNN iPad app.

It's also great for internal presentations because all your need is a computer connected to a TV or projector to show your apps. And you can run multiple devices at one so you can compare how they look.

This tip was first presented as part of the “20 Tips to Turbocharge Your Mobile Efforts (Before It’s Too Late)” panel at the 2013 Online News Association Conference in Atlanta.

#20mobile #ona13 #how to

How to get a live view of your mobile website on any computer

Chances are, you and most of your newsroom co-workers carry smartphones with you all the time. But yet we all stare at computer screens all day and probably don't pull our phones out as much as we do when we are out of the office.

So all this means journalists don't view their story, video, or section on their news organization's mobile website as often as we should.

So here's an easy way for you your colleagues to be able to see your news organization's mobile web site on their computers. And if you have "mobile" in your title, you should offer to set this up for colleagues.

I've done this in my newsroom at CNN and have immediately seen benefits. For instance, the weekend editor told me that during her shift, she glanced up and saw that an important story had a really bad headline on the mobile web site, so she fixed it. Had she not had the mobile website right in front of her, she wouldn't have known and that bad headline would have remained. These instructions can be used to show the mobile website on your personal workstation or on big screens that are already showing your desktop site. If you are doing this on a big screen, just shrink the width of the desktop page down a little bit so you can show the mobile website alongside the desktop site.

Here's an example of this on a big screen TV in the CNN newsroom. If your website is responsive, then it's really easy. All you have to do is drag the browser window down to the size of a mobile phone screen. If you aren't going to be manually refreshing the webpage yourself, then you should install an auto refresh plug-in or extension. If your website is not responsive, then you'll just have to install install some browser plugins. I'd suggest using a browser that you don't use for your main web browsing. To see your mobile website on a computer you'll be changing the "user agent" of your browser so that your browser thinks you are viewing the webpage on a phone instead of a computer. NOTE: As of the date of this writing, I have tested all of these extensions and they work as expected. There are other extensions available that do the same thing, but these are the ones I have used. As with all extensions, it's possible that these may not work in the future, but you should always be able to find similar extensions to use. Safari Safari is the easiest to do this on because you don't need to install any extensions or plugins.

Choose "Preferences" from the Safari menu

Click the "Advanced" tab and then check "Show develop menu in menu bar." You will now see a menu called "Develop" in Safari

When you are on your news organization's website, click on the "Develop" menu, click on "User Agent" and then choose the one for Safari on an iPhone. You should now see your website switch from a desktop view to a mobile phone view.

Resize your browser window to the size of a mobile phone. Any links you click on will retain the mobile phone view so you can see how article pages, videos and photo galleries look.

If you want to have the page automatically refresh, install an auto refresh extension like this one from Andrew Griffin. Google Chrome There is a way to change the user agent on a Google Chrome browser without installing a third party extension, but I find it easier to use the extension.

Open up Chrome and install the “User-Agent Switcher for Chrome” extension.

Go to your news organization's website.

In the upper right corner of your browser, you’ll see a little icon that looks like a piece of paper with some glasses on it. That’s the icon for the “User-Agent Switcher.”

Click that icon and click on “iOS” and then choose “iOS” and then click “iPhone 4” (or another mobile phone user agent listed)

You should see the page switch from the desktop view to the mobile web view. You may have to click “iPhone 4” more than once to make this happen.

Resize your browser so it’s roughly the width of a mobile phone. Any links you click on will retain the mobile phone view so you can see how article pages, videos and photo galleries look.

If you want the page to refresh automatically, install an auto refresh extension such as the “Easy Auto Refresh” Chrome extension.

Photo shows a computer at CNN using Chrome to show mobile web

Firefox

Open up Firefox and install the "Go-Mobile" add-on.

Go to your news organization's website.

Click the "Go-Mobile" icon in the upper right corner of your browser, choose the phone type (i.e. "iPhone 5 browser") and then click to turn it on. You should now see the page site from desktop view to mobile phone view.

If you want the page to reload automatically, install an auto refresh add-on such as "Tab Auto Reload." While all of these methods will make it easier for more people to keep an eye on your news organization's mobile website, it's still best to view it on an actual phone, the way real consumers do so.

This tip was first presented as part of the "20 Tips to Turbocharge Your Mobile Efforts (Before It's Too Late)" panel at the 2013 Online News Association Conference in Atlanta.

#how to #20moble #ona13

Only 16 percent of people in the UK get news on a weekly basis via tablets (according to Reuters research) and of those very few pay for content. That same Reuters study found that five percent of Britons pay for digital news every week.

Finnish app developer argues that publishers should abandon Newsstand on iOS:

For years, I’ve argued that choosing Newsstand is the best thing—the right thing—to do when publishing periodical content within the Apple ecosystem. But with the redesigned app, and with automatic content downloads no longer a being a Newsstand exclusive, the balance has finally shifted.

Can't get enough iOS vs Android? Here are 10 charts for you.

Revenue from mobile ads and searches more than doubled in the first half of 2013, reaching $3 billion, as advertisers began seeing value in offering ads over tablets and smartphones.

The Internet of Things marches on:

From the startup that reimagined the thermostat, comes a reinvented . . . smoke detector. And of course design, smart sensors, innovative UI and wireless connections are behind the new Nest device.

#Things Nest

dkiesow

mobilefirstnews

Out of the total $40 million investment, the news outlet has spent $24 million on salaries, $6 million in assets, $8 million on software, and $2 million in research. Crevier said this was a “meagre” investment when compared with developing and distributing a new print product, which he estimates would have cost $174 million. Crevier expects the $40 million investment to be recouped in 18 to 24 months from now.

The discussion is endless because there simply isn’t a right answer. At the FT, it’s a case of using the best technology and experience available to our Web development team to create the best overall experience for our users.

INMA

#HTML5 #apps

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