I spent yesterday afternoon at my first AOP (Association of Online Publishers) event, and was glad I did. The audience was made up of publishing execs from magazine and newspaper groups, and the agenda was focused on making the transition to the digital world, and how print and digital, including mobile, can work together, or even whether they should.

The event was notable for a top-class speaker line up, including representatives from the BBC, Trinity Mirror, Shortlist Media and Kaldor, and kicked off in thought-provoking fashion, as chair for the session, Matt Kelly, MD of Sol361, which delivers strategy and services to newspaper groups, posed a number of questions.

Such as: ‘Why, if mobile is the first thing consumers reach for when big news breaks, is it the last thing thought of in newsrooms?’ ‘Why do newspapers insist on putting the same stories on mobile as in their print editions, complete with the same headlines, leading to a situation where the headline, on mobile, often cuts off halfway through?’ And most provocatively, ‘Why, given the success of mobile-first offerings like Flipboard, do newspaper groups continue to try to push their newspaper brands at mobile users? Why not create a dedicated brand for a dedicated mobile offering?’ Good stuff, and we hadn’t even started yet.

Picking up on Kelly’s last point, Malcolm Coles from Trinity Mirror then ran delegates through the company’s usvsth3m project, which was launched as a pilot, with the aim of launching a new, made-for-mobile brand in just five weeks from concept to launch.

The team behind it, Coles explained, made a conscious decision to not use Trinity Mirror’s legacy platforms, but to use something more made-for-mobile – they went for Tumblr in the end, and have had some regrets about doing so, Coles explained. They also took a conscious decision to act like a startup, to the point of not worrying initially about how the new offering might be monetised.

You can check out usvsth3m here. You’ll see instantly that it’s a million miles away from a regular newspaper mobile offering, and deliberately so. There are lots of lists and pretty inconsequential articles, seen through a traditional print newspaper lens at least. But these fit the brand’s mission of providing short, snackable, irreverent and amusing content for consumers on their mobile phones. Coles told delegates he doesn’t know if the project will survive beyond the end of its initial 4-month pilot, but added that, sink or swim, valuable lessons would be learned. 

I don’t know if this is the future of newspapers on mobile, but after taking the obvious first steps over the past couple of years, it’s good to see at least one newspaper group reassessing and asking itself if there might be a better, or at least an alternative, way of doing things.

David Murphy
Editor