La centralidad de la economía, del trabajo y de la empresa

8 The economics and viability of paywalls are worthy of note but beyond the remit of this thesis.

To understand England’s existing local mobile news market it is astute to examine the wider foundations of mobile news. The world’s second largest newspaper Asahi Shimbun in Japan started delivering news through mobiles in 1999 (Loechner, 2003). It was an important move but also a logical next step in a country with a population among the world’s biggest users of mobile internet (Gomez-Barroso et al., 2010:10). When mobile internet was first launched by Japanese telecommunications company Nippon Telegraph and Telephone in February 1999 it gained 23 million subscribers in 26 months. News was the second most popular subject after entertainment (Quinn, 2003:88-89). Scandinavia has also gained and maintained remarkably high mobile use and ownership:

In 2006, there were about 10 internet and 32 mobile phone users per 100 persons in the world ... In 2006 the ITU reported that Norway had 108.6 subscriptions per 100 persons. (Ling and Donner, 2009:6)

Scandinavia also boasts companies which lead the international market with new mobile technologies, particularly Sweden’s DagensNyheter and VG in Norway. Swedish national phone company Televerket established Europe’s first mobile phone firm in 1955 and Sweden is home to Ericsson, while Nokia is based in Finland. Finland became the first country to make broadband a legal right for every citizen (Klemens, 2010:48; BBC, 2010). A passion for technology and newspapers offers the ideal mobile news combination. As well as being technological leaders, Sweden and Japan have among the highest newspaper reaches in the world (Westlund, 2010:95).

The United States of America is another mobile world leader in terms of penetration. At the start of 2015, 39 of the top 50 American news websites had more traffic to their sites and associated apps from mobile devices than from desktop (Mitchell and Holcomb, 2016). In 2000 New York Times Digital created NYT Mobile offering mobile updates 24-hours a day from The New York Times including the latest international, political, technology, finance and

sports news (Quinn, 2003:16). A decade later, 59 per cent of adults were accessing the internet wirelessly turning news into a ‘social experience’ (Pew, 2010:1). The internet had already passed newspapers in terms of popularity, in second place behind television (Purcell et al., 2010:3), and 38 per cent said they wanted more news from their neighbourhood or local community (Purcell et al., 2010:4). In 2009, 17 per cent of senior newspaper executives had a smartphone application in production while another 56 per cent planned to develop one within two years (Audit Bureau of Circulations⁹, 2009). In 2015 some British news websites were attracting larger audiences than their American competitors in both the US regional and national markets¹⁰. It has produced interesting scenarios. The Guardian balances a struggling print product with a successful website (Orton-Jones, 2012). MailOnline is so successful it launched United States and Australian versions, taking its number of unique monthly visitors to 53 million in 2015 (Ebizmba, 2016). The increasing importance of mobile news at a national level was emphasised in June 2011 when MailOnline become the first media owner to report iPhone app traffic as part of its ABC Certificate. That followed ABC’s launch of app traffic metrics the previous month (ABC, 2011b).

It took almost a decade from the launch of the world’s first mobile news site in Japan until England’s regional newspapers began moving into the market with their own mobile sites and applications for iPhones. Trinity Mirror was among those to test the water and had 13 mobile sites on titles including the Birmingham Mail and Liverpool Echo by the end of 2008 (Trinity Mirror Plc, 2008). In April 2008, Newsquest launched a breaking news and sports service for mobiles. Hundreds of people signed up during its first week at the Lancashire Telegraph (Oliver, 2008). Midland News Association began mobile versions of websites for its daily newspapers, Express & Star and Shropshire Star, the following August (Oliver, 2008).

9 The Audit Bureau of Circulations became the Alliance for Audited Media in 2012.

10Thurman credits this to traffic generated by international indexes such as Google News (Thurman, 2007:285).

Increasing numbers of readers were already accessing their main websites through their phones. The new mobile sites were described as offering “an exciting opportunity to better understand the dynamics of this channel” (Oliver, 2008). Manchester Evening News became the first regional newspaper to have its own app (Greenslade, 2009) and it was quickly followed by others. Newsquest Media Group launched 148 mobile websites for its

newspapers at the start of 2009 (Jaques, 2009). At the end of the same year Archant tested the market with three mobile sites (Amos, 2009). The Scotsman became the first Johnston Press title with an iPhone app in 2010 offering “the best of both worlds” with access to the website as well as the ability to electronically leaf through newspaper pages (Newspaper Society, 2010a). In June 2010 Rotherham Advertiser became the first newspaper to launch a births, marriages and deaths app. Commercial director Nicky Holt described the balance between electronic and print news: “We are a traditional weekly newspaper group, but that has not prevented us from identifying opportunities in new media and technology to capitalise on a key pillar of a traditional printed product (Newspaper Society, 2010b).” What could have been regarded as initial apathy towards mobiles was replaced with descriptions such as

‘exciting and important’.

In October 2014 Trinity Mirror, which was getting more than half its web traffic through mobiles, announced it was launching a new app-mediated, hyperlocal mobile ad platform that

“intelligently targets” smartphone users (Trinity Mirror Plc, 2014). The Birmingham Mail, owned by Trinity, also trialled improvements to its content management system to make journalists think more about mobile and help make their reporting more mobile-friendly. For example, a mobile preview function allowed reporters to see how articles would appear on mobile (Smith, 2014). In October 2014 the weekly Cleethorpes Chronicle launched its first mobile app which allowed readers to download the title on a subscription basis. Editor and joint owner Nigel Lowther highlighted industry reservations:

The app enables readers across the globe to keep up-to-date with their Cleethorpes news every week at minimal cost. Since we began publishing the paper more than six-and-a-half years ago people have asked us about going on line. But we’ve always resisted giving content away free on the web when it costs us money to produce it. We don’t believe traditional regional newspaper sites have worked.

They have not achieved projected revenue streams and have also had a dramatic downward impact on newspaper sales. This is our answer. (Ponsford, 2014).

Many would disagree that news is ever ‘free’, as has already been touched upon, but there is no doubt that newspapers failed to make the predicted profit from online news. In 2015 mobile advertising spend was expected to overtake print and television – increasing by 45 per cent to £3.26 billion and by another 35 per cent the following year to £4.4 billion (Sweney, 2015). At the same time Johnston Press was averaging 6.5 million mobile users a month across its titles, a figure which had doubled in a year (Sweney, 2014). A range of experiments were also taking place on the mobile platform. For example, in June 2015, LocalWorld reinvented the traditional late final editions of ten of its newspapers by publishing them on its mobile platforms. The move was described as restoring “the spirit of the evening edition newspaper” as free downloadable apps and included the day’s biggest news stories alongside

“the most social, snackable and shareable stories” (Linford, 2015).

All of these changes combined with a rise in the popularity of social media sites to allow local newspapers to rapidly reach wider audiences. A large percentage of traffic to mobile news sites arrived via social media¹¹. This is through official pages fed by mainstream media outlets and links to news websites shared among friends and other interested parties. It is worth noting that readers referred from social media spend far less time on the site (Mitchell et al., 2014). All of these sites are increasingly accessed on the go through mobiles; indeed, the importance of being mobile is crucial to Twitter. The social media site describes itself as a “real-time information network that connects you to the latest stories” (Twitter, 2015).

11 See Chapter 7 for a more in-depth discussion around social media within the Johnston Press case study.

Twitter is one of several social media sites which direct traffic to newspaper sites and

research into this area is relatively well developed (Lasorsa et al., 2012). The extent to which local newspapers now rely on social media to communicate news or use it to promote their own products is examined as part of the content analysis (see Chapters 5 and 6).

This research took place during a time of great growth and change for mobile news. It is not possible to predict how existing efforts to maximise the potential of mobiles will be viewed, particularly against historical accusations that newspapers have an “antediluvian” attitude to change (Waugh, 2011:45). However, this research offers a snapshot in time and an insight into an evolving situation which will provide context for future research. Theorist Paul Saffo believes it takes around 30 years for emerging technologies to fully “seep” into culture and this has been the case for the past 500 years (Saffo, 1992:18). On that scale, mobile news is only in its infancy and will continue to develop and change for decades to come. Saffo also warns that when a new process is being adopted, people stick to elements of their old ways despite them not being ‘relevant or necessary’ (Saffo, 1992:20). During the Johnston Press case study, this thesis will examine to what extent traditional ways of working may have to change if mobile is to be fully adopted.