Using a third party application developer to build your mobile news app is a matter of making hard choices. For most companies, the idea of spending thousands of dollars to have a software developer write a custom app to for the iPhone, then doing it again to have your content appear on an Android phone, is a non-starter. Then there are the restrictions inherent in opting for an out-of-the-box mobile solution.
Because of demand, there is a rush of new companies entering the market eager to provide mobile media solutions for newspapers and magazines, including one to be discussed here, DoApp.
But first, there are some questions a publisher should ponder:
- do you simply want to port over your news content to a mobile device? or you are considering new content? a new brand? and are you currently creating the RSS feeds necessary to do this properly?
- is there a special reader need you feel your mobile app can fill? or alternatively, is there anything unique about your market that your mobile app needs to take into account?
- is your editorial team on board, and will they take your mobile app into consideration when working on stories, tagging copy, and the like, just as they do now (we presume) for the paper's web site? (The New York Times, for instance, already produces 164 separate RSS feeds. Each, if desired, could be the source of a new online or mobile product.)
- how will you monetize this new mobile media product? are you involving your sales team upfront? will you create a new P&L, or roll this up into your interactive budget? (you have an interactive budget, right?)
My experience at newspapers with Hearst, Copley and McGraw-Hill would make me concerned about championing a mobile media solution because getting projects through the bureaucracy of a newspaper can be daunting, with different interest groups from editorial and sales, to billing and production wanting to slow things down. Having a product manager approach could speed up the process considerably. If you are the publisher things become a bit easier, I suppose. But in the end, if both editorial and sales are not on board, a publisher could end up with a nice app, but little to no revenue, and a product that readers do not find useful.
The beauty of working with an outside vendor is that they provide one-stop shop solutions, making the process of getting your mobile app created, approved and up on iTunes easier and quicker.
DoApp Inc., a Rochester, Minnesota based developer, currently has over 100 apps on the iTunes store, most from local newspapers and television stations. I downloaded the app for the
Daily Herald, a Chicago suburban newspaper owned by Paddock Publications Inc., and took it for a test ride.
The user interface is clean and well designed, making it very easy and intuitive for readers to get to the news they desire. The key to the experience is the ability of the newspaper to provide logical and clean feeds. In this case, the
Daily Herald's news may not be well tagged (I assume) because a local dog show photo appeared as the main story under "Nation/World", as well as under the proper local category. But generally each major news areas contained appropriate local content.
On the
Daily Herald web site I could find only one RSS feed available to subscribe to. Creating a mobile app may be a good opportunity to rethink the kinds of feeds you want to have and offer to the public. These will come in handy should you need them for a tablet publishing solution, as well.
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is considered now, as well as directly compete against Apple's iPad device scheduled to be released in early April.
