When U.S. newspaper publishers examine how consumers in countries such as Finland and Japan use their cell phones, you can understand why they think they’re swimming upstream with their deployment of mobile-specific news products.

America’s love affair with mobile phones seems to be limited largely to voice. Finnish and Japanese consumers, on the other hand, treat their cell phones as if they were mobile appliances, using them to play games, schedule appointments and even to make purchases from vending machines.

Consumer unwillingness to use their phones for much beyond talk or sending photos has also plagued vendors.

Case in point: Nokia, which halved the price of its Ngage phone/browser/video game device after a dismal introductory week in which only 5,000 of the 400,000 units pushed to U.S. retailers were sold.

Plowing ahead

Still, some newspapers are plowing ahead with their mobile-friendly services. The Herald in Everett, Wash. (daily, 51,455; Sunday, 56,928), has been putting up cell-oriented content for more than three years, said Mark Briggs, new media director.

The paper has more than 1,000 subscribers to a PDA service fueled by AvantGo, while an unknown number of cell phone users access a simplified news headline page through their phone browsers.

“So far the feedback has been very positive,” said Briggs. “We’ve helped a few people set up their gadgets to receive our news through e-mail and they’re all very appreciative of the service.”

Thus far, The Herald hasn’t had as much luck convincing advertisers to display their wares on either of the mobile platforms, but Briggs attributes that to a lack of a dedicated sales force.

“It should have taken off already,” said Briggs about the concept of mobile news. “But most newspapers, especially the smaller ones, are still struggling with the metamorphosis into ‘information companies.’ But that’s what we’ll all have to do if we want to have a future. The continuing evolution of content management systems and databased information should provide newspapers with the tools to quickly and efficiently reach readers on all kinds of platforms.

“However the customer wants information, we’ve got to be able to deliver it,” he said.

Fla. plans

The much-bigger Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel (daily, 244,154; Sunday, 362,170) has seen similar results from its wireless efforts.

Like The Herald, the Tribune Co.-owned Sentinel has offered wireless news for about three years. It, too, hasn’t attracted any advertising.

But that will change, according to Mike Dame, business development and product manager for Tribune Interactive-Orlando.

“Within the next year, we’ll be looking to monetize it,” Dame said. “I think 2004 is the year that mobile data goes mainstream and, in turn, I think you’ll see a lot of movement by news organizations to improve their content offerings for mobile devices, particularly smart phones. We intend to be a leader in that niche.”

Helping papers meet their wireless goals are content management vendors with apps that can repackage news and information for mobile devices.

Baseview Products’ content management apps, for example, are entirely template-based, enabling newspapers to easily repurpose information, according to Jack Rosenzweig, director of technology.

“We had AvantGo  (PDA-compatible) versions of a couple sites, but when they (AvantGo) started to charge, the newspapers dropped the support,” said Rosenzweig.

In addition to their template orientation, Harris’ new products use cascading style sheets, or CSS, which allow raw content to be optimized on a per-device basis, including mobile phones.

Saxotech’s Publicus multichannel server app, meanwhile, automatically converts data to XML, in the process allowing newspapers to develop a variety of content “channels,” one of which can be a wireless format.

Channels can be configured to either push or pull information, aimed at e-mail newsletters and simple message service (SMS) devices or WAP browser sites, PDA formatted sites and RSS feeds, respectively.

Through this design, a newspaper could use Publicus to create a feed for a wireless phone by creating a template in wireless markup language and then inserting database object tags where XML content is to appear.