Mobile Making a Move?

Two months ago on the blog for the Advancing the Story textbook she co-authored, Deborah Wenger posted about Steve Shamp who directs the New Media Institute at the University of Georgia.

Wenger wrote that after Shamp returned from a conference on mobile media, he is convinced that mobile media are now the best way to communicate with the world.

Shamp bases this on the fact that out of 6.6. billion people all over the world, 3.3 billion have a cell phone, while there are only 1.6 billion televisions and a few more radios than TVs. He says there are right now people all over the world trying to get out front through this medium.

In response Wenger wants to know if any are journalists.

I think probably not; at least not right now anyway.

Only after a lot of moaning and groaning after the internet has been around at a consumer level for nearly twenty years are we finally seeing news outlets take advantage of its immediacy.

Unfortunately it seems that news organizations are resistant to change unless they are the ones bringing it about.

However, I do believe the iPhone along with other smartphones such as the Blackberry, are going to force them to take notice of the obvious appeal of news anywhere at anytime.

To give news organizations credit though, not until the iPhone were consumers able to easily and comfortably search for news on their phone. That sort of thing was only available on a laptop with Wi-Fi. Sure cell phones have had internet for years, but it's slow and very hard to read.

That aside, I definitely agree with Shamp and while he mentioned something about advertising being lucrative on mobile devices, I hope that any news organizations that choose to take advantage of the platforms shy away from flooding our iPhones and Blackberrys with ads whenever we want to check the headlines.

We already have TVs for that.