Ellie-Nominated Mags Go Mobile

This week, the 2007 National Magazine Awards will showcase the best and the brightest in the magazine industry. Yet — from Fortune to Wired, and beyond — underneath the glossy surface, there’s a new revolution underway in mobile technology, and many of this year’s nominees are taking advantage of it.

Transitioning to a new platform is nothing new for publishers. Magazines first began migrating content to the Web about 10 years ago. They created elaborate Web sites that featured articles from print issues as well as exclusive stories. Then, publishers added slideshows and video feeds as consumer broadband dropped in price and became commonplace. Now, the industry is shifting again — this time to the cell phone.

Unfortunately, managing mobile content is far tricker than deciding what to read on a desktop. No one knows for sure what (or how much of it) people want to read on their phones. Breaking news on mobile—headlines, sports scores, and weather reports— seemed natural, so many newspapers went for the jugular and created WAP sites for on-the-go access.

With their longer lead times, the glossies have been somewhat slower to come around, but all that’s beginning to change. The software industry is also starting to respond. Adobe just released its CS3 suite of desktop applications, including a fleshed-out option to design and preview mobile sites. Designers can now plan, develop, and preview their creations on dozens of “virtual” handsets, complete with adjustments for the backlight, and how a given site will look on a phone’s screen outdoors in sunlight. So the tools are improving. But is the consumer demand there?

“Measuring the audience on mobile with any degree of certainty is very difficult right now. There are no standards of what constitutes a unique user,” says Scott Williams, vice president of mobile business development for Time Inc Interactive.

The Web, in miniature
There are several ways to approach the mobile platform. The most elaborate is the mobile Web, where products are essentially cut-down versions of regular desktop sites and designed to fit on a cell phone’s tiny 2-inch screen. One standard approach is to let consumers browse the latest headlines, the top feature stories broken down by section, and possibly some other items such as miniature slideshows.

Ellie nominees Slate (nominated for General Excellence Online), Time (which scored a General Excellence nomination and three Reporting nominations), and Fortune (another reporting nominee) all use variations on this method. Their Web sites let consumers grab a quick bite of a story, and if they want to go further, they can read the entire article right on the cell phone screen.

That doesn’t mean there is exclusive content on the phone. “Generally on all of our mobile sites the packaging [rather than the content] is different,” says Williams. “We look for unique functionality rather than unique stories. We’ll never break Britney Spears just on mobile. We’ll break it where we need to, but we’ll tell it in different ways depending on the device type.”

“The way we tell the story is the unique attribute. [On mobile] it’s much shorter; [readers] get the bite, snack, and meal approach,” Williams said. “We create that experience, including the packaging and editorial input on what’s most important on the go.”

SMS services, ringtones, and graphics
Some magazines eschew the mobile Web site in lieu of SMS text alerts. Users sign up (via cell phone or the desktop site) to receive messages several times a day. The alerts contain headlines and stories that consumers can read in a text-based fashion, along with special offers from the magazines. General Excellence nominee Wired is headed in this direction with the new Wired Mobile, a messaging service that sends editorial content and special invitations to readers.

Ringtones and wallpaper graphics are another approach. These downloadable products give consumers a way to customize their phones using various properties from the magazine, such as logos and photos. Golf Digest Magazine (nominated in the Leisure Interests category) takes this slant, offering a broad range of mobile customization products that readers can download and install.

Williams is trying another tactic with another of Time Inc’s properties, InStyle: downloadable software that enhances the phone’s features. “We try to incorporate unique functionality, such as being able to save your products [for later viewing], even when your phone has no connectivity like in the basement of Barney’s,” Williams said. “We’re also trying to integrate heavy-duty sharing in our mobile products. You can send a Time story to your email account or share it with friends.”

Good design the solution and the problem
Despite all the ideas, developing good software and designing mobile sites continue to be sticking points.

“Everyone keeps saying the mobile Internet is a year or two away, but they’ve been saying that since I started in this business back in 2000,” Williams says. The dizzying array of phones makes designing a Web site to work in Internet Explorer and Firefox seem like child’s play. “There are 250+ handsets in the US market. Effectively, each one has a different keyboard and keypad. There are probably 25 or 50 different browsers, and every screen has a different aspect ratio. But if it doesn’t look good on the consumer’s device they’re using, and if it’s not easy to use, they’re not going to use it again.”

Some mobile sites come and go as publishers continue to experiment. Condé Nast was one of the first to launch mobile versions of Glamour (Ellie-nominated for General Excellence and Personal Service this year) and Vogue (nominated for Photo Portfolio) several years ago. But those sites now seem to be offline, and the mobile URLs have disappeared from their desktop Web sites. (Condé Nast didn’t respond to several interview requests for this article.)

As advertising revenue for mobile increases, budgets will expand, so more magazines can test the cell phone angle.

“Any brand that can work in digital can also work in mobile,” says Williams. “It’s just a question of creating a product for mobile that stays true to the overall brand essence, but is targeted to the circumstance of use and the device itself. “The [desktop] Web is a browsable experience; customers choose when and where they want to go. On mobile, it’s all about getting what you want the second you want it.”

mediabistro.com’s complete Ellie 2007 coverage:
Ellies 2007: So What Do You Do, David Granger, Editor of Esquire?
Ellies 2007: So What Do You Do, Moisés Naím, Editor of Foreign Policy?
Ellies 2007: So What Do You Do, Jay Stowe, Editor of Cincinnati?
Ellies 2007: So What Do You Do, Ted Genoways, Editor of Virginia Quarterly Review?
Ellies 2007: So What Do You Do, Mark Strauss, Editor of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists?

Jamie Lendino writes mediabistro.com’s Mobile Media News blog.

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