Mobile content: snack, speed & snip

”Content on mobile phone is all about snacking. All about speed. You just want little snippets of information,” says Annabel Hembry, Head of Communications at Associated Newspapers (UK).

Ms. Hembry is responsible for mobile channels at the Mail titles (the Daily one and the Mail on Sunday), a London local paper Evening Standard and freesheets like nation-wide Metro and local London Lite.

She spoke about mobile strategies of her company at a recent INMA Outlook 2009: European Conference in Vienna, on October 1-3, 2008.

Annabel Hembry believes there are still early days for mobile content business.

”It’s been a year of mobile for the last five years. You have to be there at the beginning, because newspapers are shifting. People do want content from all different areas: from online to mobile. You’ve got to try. You’ve got to bring someone on board who can move mobile, who can move content to mobile arena,” she says.

And adds: ”You’ve got to be prepared to make mistakes. None of us are the sort of mobile gurus. Industry is changing all the time.”

Talking about her experience at Associated Newspapers, she tells that UK Metro is a prime example.

”Metro’s content is accessible through mobile. Metro has a right audience: urban. They invested a lot of money, a lot of time and effort into it. And they’ve taken on a mobile editor, so they write completely different stories than theye are online and in paper. This is very important, because readers from mobile phone want a completely different content.”

However, producing content for mobile has not had big impact on the Associated newspapers’ newsrooms until now.

”It is a different team of people at the moment,” Ms. Hembry explained.”But I think they have already been affected by all sorts of user-generated-content and interaction that way that people can take pictures on their mobile phones, can upload them to websites. That’s probably changing way journalists look at things and the way photo-journalists do things. We all know can be journalists. I think that particularly in the regional titles that’s the way things are moving.”

Watch interview with Annabel Hembry

 

(Interview made by Artur Karda, multimedia reporter at Media Regionalne, Polish part of Mecom Group.)

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