Making the most of mobile: advice from experts at #ONALondon

For most urban human beings – and many elsewhere too – a mobile phone is a ubiquitous companion. So when a news outlet has an opportunity to reach its audience directly in their pocket, it's an opportunity that should be made the most of.

Reuters' London office played host to the first Online News Association event outside of North America today, with an explicit focus on mobile.

BuzzFeed's news app editor, Stacy-Marie Ishmael and BBC mobile editor Nathalie Mailnarich gave a joint keynote to kick off the day, before Subhajit Bannerjee, mobile editor at the Guardian, and Patty Michalski, managing editor for digital, mobile and social at USA Today discussed setting up a mobile newsroom.

Here are four themes of best practice in all of their talks for how news organisations should approach mobile.

BBC's @nmalinarich and Buzzfeed's @s_m_i discuss their experiences shaping mobile products. #ONALondon pic.twitter.com/AD9JhfEz6c

— Jen Mizgata (@JMizgata) March 6, 2015

A mobile editor should be a 'cultural translator'

Stacey-Marie Ishmael has been at BuzzFeed for three months and regularly chairs meetings between the editorial and product side of the business to discuss their mobile offering.

"Twice a week all of my journalists sit with developers, designers and product designers and argue," she laughed, "but there's a healthy and necessary tension there."

With a background in editorial her seven years at the Financial Times and product development experience at New York start Percolate, she now acts as a "cultural translator for editorial and product" where she can "own that relationship and evangelise both sides".

The same can be said at the Guardian, where Banerjee told delegates he encouraged a "cross-pollination" of ideas where editors regularly go to sit with developers.

Aim for the 'minimum delightful experience'

A mantra of product development in recent years has been to work quickly with a minimum of excess baggage.

This lean, agile start-up approach evoked the mantra of a 'minimum viable product' but Ishmael suggested news organisations should be thinking about the "minimum delightful experience" for their mobile product.

Banerjee echoed similar thoughts in his session, stressing that no matter where the audience comes from – Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, WhatsApp – the page needs to format properly and open quickly.

"If a user clicks on a link on Facebook [on mobile] and it takes a long time or doesn't format properly, you've lost that user," he said.

Talking the mobile-first newsroom with @pmmichalski @subhajitb @BBCSteveH #ONALondon pic.twitter.com/ngHa6fp2kz

— Alia E. Dastagir (@alia_e) March 6, 2015

Put mobile front and center

There's no specific mobile team at the Guardian and neither at USA Today, agreed Bannerjee and Michalski.

For the Guardian it was a matter of not wanting to separate the team physically and therefore make responsibility for mobile performance separate from the rest of the newsroom.

At USA Today combining the digital, mobile and social teams had been a "game changer", said Michalski, putting them at the front line of leading the organisation.

All graphics are produced with social and mobile in mind first, and daily meetings begin with looking at how the previous day's editorial content performed on different platforms, she said.

At BuzzFeed, Ishmael said a huge focus over the last year has been on "deconstructing the way we do stories and thinking if we were to report this with mobile, how would it look?"

"Why not create stories from there, create them in the same context as people will be interacting with it later," she said.

You need people who are completely obsessed in your newsroom, evangelising from a mobile perspective.

Make push notifications worth it

When Ishmael first started out, a senior editor often asked her "if you ran into a pub what would you yell?", and she said the same should apply to push notifications.

"There's a lot going on, it's really loud, they're probably wasted, so how do you get people to care?"

She said it was vital to think about the context of the individual user in this setting, something that may be difficult, but is essential in making the notification worth opening.

Both the Guardian and BBC are working towards more personalisation in their news apps and in their push alerts, something that will be increasingly important should wearables fulfil their hype.

"I might be interested in North Korea, but it's not strictly relevant when I'm jogging," said Malinarich.

Update: This article has been updated with the correct spelling of Stacy-Marie Ishmael's name and a clarification of where she got her editorial and product development experience. This is also the first ONA conference outside North America, not the US as previously stated.

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