Now the newspaper fits in your Pocket

This story in The New York Times states that Verve Wireless has come up with a way to help local newspapers bring their product to the 40 million people in the U.S. that actively use their cell phone to go online. Verve Wireless provides publishing technologies to create newspaper websites for cell phones in exchange for a share of the ad revenue.

The Associated Press, Verve's biggest customer, made an investment of $3 million to finance the company, based Encinitas, CA. Verve already provides mobile versions of 4,000 newspapers from 140 publishers.

Verve's chief executive, Art Howe said mobile versions of Web sites “cannot just be Internet lite,” they must be redesigned to better fit this new medium of cell phones and PDAs. Verve designed a application for the iPhone one that lets users look through the day's headlines, save articles to read later and send articles to friends.

“Mobile is actually a better way to reach people than print or even Web. It’s versatile, immediate, travels and is just as compelling,” said Howe. With Verve' software publishers can place national ad campaigns on their sites or upload local ads to their cellphone sites.

Philadelphia Magazine, for example, sent readers of its Verve-developed Web site a text message offering $4 grapefruit cocktails and half-price appetizers at a local bar.

Mobile companies hope the ad customization that cellphones offer will encourage advertisers to spend more for ads on cellphones.

Advertisers will spend only $1.6 billion on mobile ads this year, while spending $26 billion online, predicts eMarketer, a marketing research firm.

While their is a hugh potential for growth in mobile readership and advertising I think it will take a three to five years for this market to really take off and for companies to realize that they can reach potential customers by advertising on mobile sites.

My personal cell phone, a cheap, Samsung SGH A707 only lets me look up news on CNN.com and it only lets you browse through a list of different news categories. Even people who have the iPhone run into areas where their internet connection is slow or does not work because they cannot find a wireless network.

Reading a newspaper or a book on the small scree of a cellphone or PDA or a electronic book reader is never going to be as easy as reading on a laptop or reading the print copy. Its like watching a movie on a big screen TV and then watching it on a portable DVD player.

I think that most people who have iPhones only use it to surf the internet when they have to. They use when they are at work, stung in an airport or, taking the subway. Most people would rather open up their laptop or buy a print copy then read on a screen so small that you have to squint at it if they really wanted to spend a few minutes reading the paper. I think most people would rather watch a movie on a big screen TV rather then their laptop or a portable DVD player.

Surfing the web on your cell phones is good for finding out quick facts like the weather, sports scores and stock updates if you cannot get to you computer or you do not want to wait for your laptop to start up. How many "CrackBerry" do you that spend several hours every week reading the paper? The PDA and the cellphone are great devices for keeping in touch with friends no matter how far away you are but not for reading.

I think that people who do spend a lot of time surfing the internet on their cellphone get most of their news from TV news and rarely read any of the copy below the headlines when they glance at the local paper.

Creating mobile websites for local newspapers will help them to increase their ad revenues but I think it will do little to help them improve circulation or increase the number of people who read the paper everyday.

This is another tool that newspapers should jump on to make their product more accessible to more readers but in the end it will do little to solve the revenue problems that the newspaper industry is facing.