My father, a first-generation American, shared this observation when he returned from a trip to the motherland a few years ago:
Even in the most isolated rural villages, where modern plumbing doesn’t exist and electricity is unreliable, everyone owns a cell phone. Gone are the days when Ma Farmer clangs a pot with a wooden spoon to draw Pa Farmer in from the fields for supper. Now it’s just a matter of flipping open a phone and dialing his digits.
The cell phone and other mobile devices have also affected American life beyond the traditional 3:30 p.m. call to ask the spouse what’s for dinner. According to the Pew people pollsters, these devices are erasing the digital divide between white Americans and their black and Hispanic counterparts. Check out these numbers:
- On a typical day, 59 percent of whites hit the web through a hardwired computer. Only 45 percent of blacks do the same.
- However, blacks and Hispanics hit the web through their mobile devices about 42 percent more often than whites, despite equal ownership of such devices.
- Altogether, blacks and whites did the same number of activities online, regardless of how they accessed the net.
This leads me to ask: If a hyperlocal news outlet delivers content — including pretty pictures, big graphics, and Flash video — strictly through mobile-unfriendly websites, then who’s actually receiving the news? If the hyperlocal beat consists mostly of people who can access the web by a desktop or laptop computer (regardless of race), then web design doesn’t matter.
But for those outlets operating in communities where residents tend to access the web on mobile devices (particularly cell phones without full HTML browsers), then it may be time to consider a phone-friendly layout that can be delivered without the benefit of an app. That means fewer photos, zero multimedia, strictly text content. It also means tighter, more concise writing, shorter leads, and perhaps use of the standard “inverted pyramid” format instead of a conversational, bloggy style of writing.
I haven’t done research into how a hyperlocalist would create a phone-friendly layout, but it seems any common web-publishing tool will do as long as the content’s structure and layout are simple enough for a phone to digest. (This does NOT include Google’s Blogger, which tends to have painfully slow download times on mobile devices.)
I’ll touch on news distribution via text message tomorrow.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user kristi-san.
That was my point in the rejected KNC application – cell access. WordPress, by the way, has excellent plugins to put a mobile-friendly design in place for those accessing your site that way.
It’s a shame that the Knight Foundation passed on that opportunity, given mobile’s impact on internet access among black and Hispanic Americans.
On a related note, Sunday’s New York Times had a story on how cell phones are used in other countries. In a nutshell, people outside the United States use cell phones for stuff like job searches and fund transfers, in addition to more traditional uses. And as I mentioned in my post above, cell phones in these countries are more common than modern plumbing.
Terrific, people abroad are using cell phones instead of iPhones and iPads — what does that mean for hyperlocalists? Chances are, it means immigrant communities are using the same technology here in the United States, either out of habit or, more likely, because it makes it easier to connect with friends and family in the motherland. Cell phones are far from obsolete in these communities.
Get with it, Knight Foundation! Let’s serve the underserved!