Maybe it’s not quite as big a change as the rise of the web — but the rise of the smartphone deserves to be in the conversation. And traditional news companies are falling behind.
There’s lots of great stuff in there as usual, with articles on the state of journalism education, citizen journalism in Turkey, comics journalism, epic poetry (!), and more.
I write a column for the print edition of the magazine. Here’s mine from the new issue.
Traditional news organizations have spent the past decade responding to an enormously disruptive piece of technology: the web browser. Their old monopolies, their old claims on the audience’s attention, were broken by a platform that let anyone publish — no printing press or broadcast tower required. The impact on their business models, particularly at newspapers…well, you know all about that.
But just when news organizations were starting to feel more at home on the web — just when, in many newsrooms, digital was no longer being treated as a sad sister to print — along comes another blow-up-the-model moment: mobile.
It would be an exaggeration to say that the rise of the smartphone is a shift on par with the rise of the web. But it wouldn’t be that much of one. Seven years after the iPhone, smartphones have moved from a tool of the tech elite to a handheld computer in everyone’s pocket. They’re radically changing how people are getting their news. And I fear that many news outlets still haven’t wrestled with how big a change they represent.
New data from eMarketer
estimates that, in the United States, about 23 percent of Americans’
total media consumption in 2014 will come on mobile devices. That’s
counting all media formats, including television, radio and print.
Mobile’s already ahead of the total for laptops and desktops, 18
percent. And its share will keep growing as networks get faster and
devices get cheaper.It’s
not uncommon for major news organizations to see 40 percent of their
online audience on mobile devices, most of them smartphones.http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/06/the-mobile-majority-engaging-people-on-smartphones-is-the-next-big-challenge-to-the-news/
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