In the early days of the web, almost all brick-and-mortar companies woefully under-invested in digital technology and product development. These days everyone has a website and even a mobile app or two. But the shift to mobile is so rapid that many companies are in danger of repeating the same mistake and under-investing in mobile.
At The New York Times, we are determined not to fall into that trap. Not only are we focusing more technology resources on mobile development, we are also rethinking how our newsroom and product development teams operate so that we can become a mobile-first company. And when we say mobile, we mean smartphone.
Defining ‘mobile’ as a smartphone is problematic for a few reasons. Does Frons mean a smartphone app or a smartphone website? Is it both? Do tablets with cell service or smartwatches count? Frons seems to be implying that mobile means mobile app (or multitude of apps in the case of The Times) when he advises:
If you’ve got 30 engineers on the web and three on mobile, you’ve got to even that balance out quite a bit. If you’re spending 80 percent of your money on desktop and 20 percent on mobile, it should probably be 50/50 at least, if not tilting the balance toward mobile just in terms of playing catchup.
I agree there needs to be a better balance if you have those kind of numbers, but personally I don’t think there should be such a strong distinction between desktop and mobile for news businesses. The news should be the same on whatever device you choose to consume it on web engineers should be working on building responsive and mobile-optimized sites. There doesn’t need to be a desktop web team and a mobile web team—but I get the impression from this article that this is what The Times has.
Frons adds another piece of advice without providing any evidence for his claims, offering it up as a “reminder”:
Remember that mobile is a push medium, that notifications have become crucial for driving traffic – reminding people that you’re there, stimulating awareness and encouraging usage.
I’d like to see numbers to back this up. I agree that notifications increase traffic, but that doesn’t imply that they’re crucial for a news company or that mobile is a push medium. Mobile is a multidirectional communication medium.