Mourning my drowned iPhone

Buttry at son Joe's wedding rehearsal

That moment of silence for my iPhone was not mourning. I was just stunned. The sobbing, that was mourning.

For three years now, since the first iPhones came out, Apple’s mobile meth has been at the heart of my innovation pitch.

At the first Newspaper Next symposium in February 2006, Harvard scholar Clayton Christensen used phones as an example in explaining disruptive innovation. I understood instantly. At an intellectual level, I understood Christensen’s story of how Alexander Graham Bell’s original telephone disrupted Western Union and the telegraph business. At a personal level, I understood deeply Christensen’s story of how the original mobile phones – though barely good enough by such standard measures as reliability, audio quality, battery endurance and size – changed communication forever because they offered mobility.

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How news organizations need to change to pursue a mobile-first strategy

To read all three of my “mobile-first strategy” posts as a pdf with a table of contents, scroll to the end of this post.

I used to watch the crowds in airport lounges when I traveled, studying how people read newspapers. Even with circulation declining, you could see people reading newspapers intently. Especially after 2001, people would have plenty of time to read while waiting for flights, and newsstands stocked a variety of papers to choose from.

Look around an airport lounge now. You’ll see more people looking into their phones than holding newspapers.

I get disgusted as people in news media companies fret over trying to squeeze some money out of Google or trying to charge for the privilege of reading our content. Whatever the merits of those arguments, they are essentially pleas to slow time down. But when I see people in the airport lounge, I know time is only accelerating with each tap of their thumbs.

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Curriculum advice for journalism schools

I haven’t spent this much time talking to journalism professors and students since I graduated from Texas Christian University (let’s just say some time ago).

I visited TCU last week to present seminars on the Complete Community Connection and journalism ethics in the digital age. And since I was sticking around for some memory-lane time, the curriculum committee at TCU’s Schieffer School of Journalism asked me to meet with them and tell them what I think journalism schools should be teaching about our swiftly changing field.

I shared my views with them and will share them with you here shortly. The TCU meetings continued a heavy fall schedule of consultations with journalism faculty and students on a variety of related topics:

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News organizations need mobile-first strategy

To read all three of my “mobile-first strategy” posts as a pdf with a table of contents, scroll to the end of this post.

News organizations are belatedly, reluctantly and often awkwardly pursuing “web-first” strategies. As we fight these web battles, I am increasingly coming to believe that “web first” is what the military would call fighting the last war. News organizations need a mobile-first strategy.

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Trying out Twitter for fun and business

I’ll be teaching Getting Started with Twitter this Tuesday and Thursday at Kirkwood Community College. This post is designed to supplement the course. It is an updated, adapted version of earlier tip sheets I have done, most recently the Getting started in Twitter tips I provided in August for my Using Social Media for Business class. Those tips, of course, focused on business uses for Twitter. These will include business and personal uses.

Twitter is a useful and fun communication tool for a variety of business and personal uses: 

• You can follow activities and discussions of people in the community, staying current on issues and events.
• You can connect with colleagues and share ideas with them.
• You can follow the news.

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News companies need to help local businesses pursue mobile opportunities

To read all three of my “mobile-first strategy” posts as a pdf with a table of contents, scroll to the bottom of this post.

When I try out a new app for my iPhone, I think of opportunities the news business missed years ago. More importantly, I think of opportunities we need to pursue today.

Many years ago, before the development of the World Wide Web, I was an editor at the Kansas City Star. Some critics fault newspapers for failing to anticipate the need to move into the digital age, but I remember a project called  StarText. We were planning to deliver the next day’s news stories electronically to subscribers the night before. The stories were just in text and you needed a  modem to receive them and few people had modems then. But we were making our first awkward moves into digital delivery of news.

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