By Jim Chisholm
Special to Newspapers & Technology

The revolution has only just begun.

Just at a time when we begin to think we understand the consequences of the millennial brands - Google, Craigslist, Harry Potter, al Qaeda, Skype, 3G, etc. - then the game leaps to a whole new level.

The driver of the new revolution? Wireless mobile.

Mobile is the ultimate medium. Always on. Always with you. Perfectly targeted to whom you want, where you want, when you want. The scale and opportunity of this medium has only been held back by the avaricious greed of the telco operators, who mostly saw their ability to charge beyond market rate as gift from the lords above.

 

As someone whose mobile phone costs regularly eclipse $1,700 month, I have been watching with glee as the mobile majors - some of the world’s largest communications companies - have seen their values plummet. It never seemed right to me that companies with more customers than many continent’s populations could seemingly charge what they wanted.

Newspaper renaissance

Today, low-cost mobile communications are becoming a reality, and with that the revolution that will herald the long-awaited renaissance in newspaper publishing.

Indeed, the opportunities are growing even faster than mobile communications costs are plummeting.

Any conversation about newspaper industry mobile marketing soon turns to the developments in Norway and Japan.

Consider VG, Norway’s leading tabloid daily newspaper.

As bombs and rockets fell in Beirut, readers flocked to the paper’s Web site to view video clips and other information posted by an expatriate Norwegian blogger armed with nothing more than a Nokia phone.

For more than two years, readers have sent in materials that are posted on the paper’s site. It even offers readers T-shirts upon which are printed their own photographs. So many thousands of readers send in material each day that VG had to staff a special desk to handle the content.

VG’s parent company, Schibsted, recently stated that more than 25 percent of its profits are derived from its digital activities.

No wonder.

But there is another factor behind the extraordinary and deserved success of VG: Telenor, Norway’s leading wireless provider.

Instead of charging as much as it could, whenever it could, Telenor encouraged new customers by offering low-cost introductory plans and followed those up with a sensibly structured pricing model.

Where other providers have tried to rule their roosts, Telenor opted for a strategy to become a true partner and participant.

Japanese newspapers are reporting similar successes.

Papers are seeing high subscription levels for all of their offerings, from news and sports to finance and games. Why? Part of the reason is innovating content, but another big consideration is that Japanese telecommunications providers have long offered attractive pricing.

In Austria, one newspaper publisher took its mobile strategy one step further by installing wireless nodes throughout its circulation area. Its subscribers now have free wireless access, and with that comes services such as voice-over IP telephony and other broadband benefits, all courtesy of the newspaper.

All of this comes as next-gen mobile phones become equipped with both telephony and wireless Web access.

Logical domain

For three years now, I’ve been arguing that newspapers should provide a wireless service across their circulation areas, in the process corralling their digital consumers.

Ironically, another medium has stepped forward to offer this strategy - Yahoo, in San Francisco.

Wireless mobile services are the logical domain of newspapers.

There are hundreds of examples today that demonstrate how attractive mobile services are to current and potential readers. These services add value and therefore encourage consumer loyalty among both older and younger customers.

Most important, wireless services generate profit and shareholder value without requiring the investment we all believed was necessary to develop such interactive services.

Now is the time for newspapers to seize this opportunity and corner this most compatible market, before it is too late.
 

Jim Chisholm is joint principal of iMedia, a leading newspaper industry adviser. He can be reached at jim.chisholm@futureofthenewspaper.com.