Experiments in New Media

Amy Gahran has a thoughtful and well-reasoned post today on the Knight Digital Media Center about her concern--and it's a good one--that journalism conferences should put mobile first.  (In fact, our panelist Steve Buttry of TBD.com and author of a thoughtful mobile-first strategy for news media, tipped us off to Gahran's post.)  She rightly notes:

Right now is when journalists and editors should be considering the opportunities and implications that mobile media will increasingly have for their work. How can you craft stories that will have mobile-friendly components or engagement features? How do you get past shovelware on the mobile web? What kinds of news apps really make sense? What about integrating your news with locative social tools like Foursquare or Facebook places? How can you engage the vast majority of people in your coverage area who don’t use smart phones, but who rely heavily on their feature phones?

If we’re lucky, for about a year or so the news business still has a brief window in which to take a leading role as mobile media develops. Journalists and editors should be meeting now to discuss what they can do with mobile media. And journalism conferences are still where a lot of the best minds in our business get together and have meaningful conversations or brainstorming sessions.

Gahran's right that the main pages of NASW's conference don't make much of mobile; she says of NASW, "the topic may get discussed here and there during the sessions, but it’s definitely not highlighted in any way."  And you'd have to have found this little blog to know that mobile's definitely on our agenda.  It's why we wanted the panelists we have, from Danielle Brigida, who's using mobile tech to get people out into wild spaces for the National Wildlife Federation, to Buttry, who's long advocated mobile strategy.

So, just to recap and in case you missed them, find out about these aspects of mobile we hope our panelists will focus on--and which you can find elsewhere on this blog:

• The five important mobile findings relevant to news organizations from a recent Pew study--and how they fit into Steve Buttry's mobile first strategy for news organizations.  It's perhaps worth noting that this post by panel moderator Joe Bonner is far and away the most-viewed post on this blog for the panel.
• Recent resources from our panelists, including Brigida's slides from a PRSA panel on location-based and mobile apps from her NWF work;
• TIME just named Tumblr, home of panelist Mark Coatney, one of its top 50 websites--citing its mobile app as part of the reason. We're expecting a fresh update on why at the panel.
• We looked at what Brigida's doing at NWF putting location-based social media into the mix -- much of it using mobile devices.

No, this isn't a mobile-only panel, but we're expecting it to loom large in the discussion.  And as a member of the NASW workshops committee, I'll be sure to suggest a mobile workshop for next time.  Let's all do the same for our next round of conferences, and not leave it to the "specialty" groups to handle.