That’s how things roll, not just in my parents’ country of birth but across a big swath of the planet, according to The New York Times. Outside the United States, text messaging is used to find jobs, transfer funds, even monitor elections for fraud. These people don’t worry about broadband service for their iThingies, as long as the cell phone towers keep pumping out the juice.

I’m willing to bet that if people abroad are texting like fiends, their emigre counterparts in the United States are doing the same. They’re reconnecting with friends in the motherland and making new connections here, all via text messaging. Why shouldn’t they receive hyperlocal news in the same way?

Unfortunately, there are a few hurdles to that, namely the cost to send and receive text messages in the United States. AT&T charges $20 per month for unlimited texting on top of its smartphone data plans, and Verizon has a text-heavy plan for $35 each month, excluding voice telephony. Compare that with the one-cent text rate offered by one Indian carrier, The Times reported.

Another sticking point is the need to send bulk messages from a single source. Google Voice and Twitter allow a few text messages for free, but broadcasting more will require a paid account with SMS Everywhere or some other service. It’s possible to have a sponsor shoulder this cost for the hyperlocal outlet, but it doesn’t dodge the next hurdle.

And that is: What kind of information should be sent via text? Should the standard 160-character message contain only a headline with a link? Will the recipient follow that link to the full story? If yes, will the full story appear in a mobile-friendly format?

Also, in what language should the text and full story appear? If the goal is to reach immigrants, then the content probably should appear in their primary language. This might mean the cost of hiring an interpreter who not only can convert an English-language story into some other tongue, but can text the story using that language’s colloquial abbreviations and acronyms.

There are kinks to texting news content, but I still think it’s worth exploring if the objective is to deliver news to traditionally underserved immigrant communities.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user daveblume.

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.