NewsBeat

February 2016 NewsBeat 15 for the foreseeable future. Once we realize the depth of this behavioral shift, the more we understand how to capitalize on it. 7. We now have a battle on two fronts I'm not suggesting we abandon our websites or stop working with Facebook, Apple, YouTube and the rest of the mega-distributors. To the contrary, we should continue to maximize social and search referrals while relentlessly experimenting with distributed content. That's the first front. But you can't fight on the first front without fighting on the second. I don't know about you, but I'm not punting on direct relationships with our users. Since this industry is obsessed with BuzzFeed, I'll use them as an example: while everyone buzzes about BuzzFeed's social distribution, the company has built up a mobile app arm with a larger product staff than most of its competitors. The second front is more expensive, competitive and risky than the first, but we don't have a choice. 8. Shorter content is not a mobile strategy When starting to brainstorm an app or an email product, the discussion almost always begins with how to take existing content and "shorten" it for mobile. Just shortening your website content for a mobile app — video included — is like putting radio on TV: adding a camera that shows the host talking awkwardly into a microphone. It's the price of entry perhaps, but it doesn't guarantee an audience. A beautiful design is great, too, but it doesn't mean people will keep using it. Even worse with mobile, it certainly doesn't guarantee any revenue. 9. Starting with solutions is suicide These days media businesses require either massive scale, or a niche built upon a vein of gold. The easy "gets" are gone, and if you fall in the middle, you fall through the world. That's why we need start with a problem. Life's too short to build something that nobody wants. How can we be sure to tackle a real problem? Alas, we can't be 100% sure, but we can minimize the risk a lot by observing and talking to people. This is the core of human-centered design, and we can increase our chances of success by considering problems that go beyond news consumption. At the ONA's Mobile Design Camp in Seattle last Friday, the group came up with better products for solving "gift giving" problems than "news filtering" problems. What about tackling information-related problems with health care, travel, retail, transportation or finance? Dig broader and bigger to find new veins of gold. 10. Many of the best product people don't want to work in big media They want to work at startups. That's why we should act more like startups ourselves by tackling hard problems, bending the rules, embracing failure, exuding patience, having fun and handing our product talent massive amounts of freedom (i.e. stop telling them what to do and when to do it.) Success with product begins with people. 11. The industry is playing defense In the last few years, media companies have been thrown against the ropes, suddenly playing more defense than offense. This is especially true of the news business, which is in the midst of its greatest disruption of all. This is a business that doesn't like to play defense. So let's play offense. Swing bigger, invest more, experiment more, measure more. Accept that we don't know all the answers. If we believe the hard truths of mobile disruption, we'll double down on the challenge before us. — Cory Bergman writes the Mobile Media Memo, and is the co-founder and GM of Breaking News, a mobile startup owned by NBC. This reflects his personal views, not necessarily those of NBC. He's @corybe on Twitter.

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