Mobile offers local media a digital do-over

Ken Doctor reporting:
The good news is that you only have to worry about one tech trend in 2014.  But it’s a doozy. 

The trend is the dramatic shift to mobile computing, a communications revolution rivaling the arrival of the Internet itself. The fast-moving swing to mobile from desktop computing is changing everything from interpersonal communications to news consumption to commerce.  

For newspapers and local broadcasters seeking to recapture some of the audience, revenues and relevance that they lost in the rather inelegant way they stumbled into Internet publishing in the 1990s, the shift to mobile computing represents a rare do-over. 

Because the mobile universe is largely a work in progress, there is time for legacy media companies to create transformational products to delight consumers and attract a host of advertising, subscription and transactional revenues. Local media companies have two advantages as they mobilize for mobile:

1.  They are unrivaled in the local power of their brands, their content-creation capabilities, their ad sales staffs and their ability to market new products through their existing media.
  
2.  Owing to their largely inept responses to the initial emergence of the Internet, publishers and broadcasters know the pain of blundering into a new business paradigm without a deep understanding of the dynamics of the marketplace or a thoughtful strategic plan for capitalizing on opportunities and defending against threats.  

In the interests of preventing history from repeating itself, here’s what everyone needs to know about this disruptive, compulsive new technology platform:
http://newsosaur.blogspot.fi/2014/01/mobile-offers-local-media-digital-do.html