While it has not crossed my mind once, the thought has dwelled in my brain, especially I complete a visit to a newsroom where all the elements are present to proceed with a mobile first strategy, except for that big elephant in the room. The elephant could be 48 pages or 72, or , as in the case of Helsingin Sanomat, 60…..
“We have some 60 pages to fill every day,” said Päivi Anttikoski, editor-in-chief of the Sanomat, at a conference in London last week. “If the news situation is not so great, we still have to fill the paper.”
Indeed, the printed product has a beginning a middle and an end. It has a set number of pages. Containers that have to be filled and nurtured. This takes time. Time that is not going to be there to be worried about the necessary updating that mobile first newsrooms value so much—as do users. In print, there is a space to fill. Editors begin their day with a sense of how big or small that space may be. Space rules the day. In a mobile publishing world, time trumps quantity. Time and updates rule.
As I see it, smart editors are beginning to realize it, the venerable print edition, the big elephant, the multi page monster, is a gigantic project. Meanwhile, in the world of mobile, it is the single article that deserves our attention.
When Espen Egil Hansen, the editor of Norway’s Aftenposten, declares that “we produce one thousand front pages a day,” he is granting status to every article that ends up on the newspaper’s website (www.aftenposten.no).
Esa Mäkinen, news editor for data and interactives, at Helsingin Sanomat, agrees:
“[But] we need to rethink our core product, the article. We have to come up with something radically new,” said Mäkinen.
Indeed, and I am happy to say that some editors are giving this thought more than lip service.
I am happy to be working with Espen’s Aftenposten team on a series of storytelling strategies that give the individual article power, its own engine and personality.