Earlier this week, a thread on Branch asked journalists what they’d like to see at this year’s Online News Association’s conference, the biggest annual meeting of digital journalists.  Many of the responses focused on making things, which is a refreshing new addition for an industry that traditionally just focused on telling stories.  But very few of the responses mentioned business innovation and user data, even as the industry’s survival hinges on it.

No more blaming the business side for our industry’s failures.  Journalists are now responsible for revenue, too.  Let me explain.

In the very near future, most news will be consumed on mobile.  Most purchasing decisions will be made via mobile, too.  As I recently wrote on Poynter, mobile will disrupt journalism like the Internet did a decade ago.

It all hinges on data.  The more you know about a user — her history, physical location, likes, search terms, etc. — the better you can personalize her mobile experience and target meaningful advertising.  Facebook is arguably a much better news experience than any news app — “We want to give everyone in the world the best personalized newspaper in the world,” Zuckerberg said last month — and perhaps that’s why people spend 11X more time on Facebook’s app than all news apps combined.  On the advertising side, all that data adds up to ad targeting that news organizations can’t match.

“The key factor for Facebook here is to capture as much data as possible on Facebook users’ mobile habits,” writes Ewan Spence in Forbes. “That’s why Facebook is involved in mobile, and that’s why they need to keep pace with the ecosystems [Google and Apple] that are capturing all that mobile data.”

So it’s not about simply extending our news experiences into mobile, but leveraging mobile to capture data that we can use to make better user experiences and compete for advertising dollars.  The challenge is convincing users to give you their data.  And that’s where journalists, who increasingly are the same people who make things at news organizations, come into the picture. 

We have to make mobile products that get better with data.  Products that solve a problem in such an obvious way, users are willing to tell us about themselves.  This is not a responsive design or “just another news app.”  With the exception of a small handful of news organizations, paywalls are just a partial patch: they generate data, but barely influence the experience and don’t come close to enabling mobile ad targeting widely available on Google, Facebook and Twitter.

If I may suggest, the next time journalists get together at a big event, let’s throw out the stuff we always talk about and focus on the pressing business and product challenges of mobile and data.  It may not be popular, but it’s our survival.

Last month I made the case that mobile will disrupt journalism like the Internet did a decade ago.  Many of you have asked, “Now what?”  Here are a few suggestions to start shifting your mindset to mobile.

1. Force yourself to live mobile at home

If your readers are shifting to phones and tablets, so should you.  As a journalist, I’d always start my day with a computer on my lap.  My default state was content creation, not consumption.  But a few months ago, I forced myself to shift to a mobile consumption mindset in the morning, reaching for my phone instead.  At night, I gravitate toward a tablet.

I read and answer email, catch up on industry news, fire off a few tweets and occasionally buy something, too.  It’s deeply educational.  A few experiences are great, most are not.  I often find myself waiting, pinching, swiping my way around, instead of getting what I want and getting things done.  The only way to really understand the frustration — and by extension the opportunity — is to experience it yourself.

“Pay particular attention to things that chafe you,” explains startup guru Paul Graham on his blog. “The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It’s to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.”

2. Become a student of the mobile space

While you’re discovering really bad mobile experiences — and hopefully beginning to think how to make them better — you should also explore the leading-edge of new mobile products and the trends that drive them.

Here are some recommendations for publications and social resources to keep abreast of the mobile product world, especially in context of news and information:

• Techmeme is always a great overview with a growing mobile presence. Ignore all the techy device news (even I’m confused by all the different devices and operating systems) and look for mobile trends, new products and big partnerships.
  
  
• Appnewser is a good source, and Poynter, NiemanLab and Journalism.co.uk’s are beefing up their mobile coverage.  On the sales and marketing front, I like Mobile Marketer and Digiday.  For second screen coverage, there’s Lost Remote.
  
  
• @mashablemobile, @atdmobile, @readwritemobile, @tnwmobile, @gigaommobile should get you started with tech blogs.
  
  
• For research, watch Flurry’s blog, Comscore and Pew Internet.
  
  
• The Mobile Journalism group on Facebook, started by Will Sullivan. (Apply to join only if you work in the news business).

If you see anything else I should add, just ping me on Twitter (@corybe).

3. Play with promising new mobile products

As you read about the mobile space — and occasionally check the top charts on Apple and Google’s app stores — you’ll discover new mobile experiences to try.  Don’t just limit yourself to news, but keep an eye out for promising utilities, social networks and even information gaming, too.

Give these new products an honest try.  See if they naturally become part of your routine.  Do they solve any of your frustrations?  Do they make something easier, more efficient, more fun?  Why or why not? 

Over time, you’ll begin to see if your own predictions match up with the rest of the market (i.e. chart positions and ratings).  You’ll start to build some product intuition that will help you identify and pursue your own mobile ideas.

4. Start looking at the data

Once you become more astute as a mobile-first consumer, you should begin to wonder how people are using (or not using) your newsroom’s mobile experiences.

Ask your analytics guru for insight (or better yet, access).  How do people interact inside your mobile experiences?  Phone vs. tablet?  Web vs. app?  What types of stories are most popular?  Does that vary with time of day?  By device?  What do users share the most?  Do they read articles or bail out after a quick scroll? Etc. 

Unlike the desktop, mobile is driven by context.  People look for different kinds of information — and consume it differently — depending on what they’re doing and where they are.  Often times, we lack this data, but we shouldn’t take our eyes off the user.

As outgoing Groupon CEO Andrew Mason explained, “My biggest regrets are the moments that I let a lack of data override my intuition on what’s best for our customers.”

When you start learning these habits — and build up your intuition — you can better tailor your own coverage to fulfill user needs.  Share your findings with the newsroom, and encourage others to provide their feedback and insights.

When I wondered openly about how to get journalists excited about mobile media, AP’s Ted Anthony tweeted to me, “Make it about people, not platforms.”  I couldn’t agree more.

We have a long ways to go, but this is a good starting point.

(Full disclosure: I’m GM of Breaking News, a mobile-first startup owned by NBC News. Keep an eye on our @breaking Twitter account for upcoming news on how we’re approaching mobile.)

(Updated) Facebook is now a mobile company, not just in culture, but in audience.  During its Q4 earnings announcement, Facebook said its mobile active users surpassed the desktop for the first time in its history — 680 million users (+57% YOY) out of 1.06 billion overall.

But perhaps the most surprising data point is the skyrocketing number of mobile-only users. “In only a year, just under 100 million more people starting using Facebook only on mobile, never touching desktop,” explained The Verge reporter Tim Carmody.

This should startle journalists for a couple reasons. 

First, Facebook’s mobile footprint eclipses every news organization on the planet, and a huge population of users are growing accustomed to consuming mobile news on Facebook.  It accounts for 23% of all time spent with mobile apps, according to Comscore in December. That beats every news organization’s app combined by a long shot. A study by Flurry in November found that the news category only accounts for 2% of total time spent on apps. Social apps accounted for 26%.

Twitter is also forming mobile habits around real-time news consumption, and the sky is the limit if it can solve the discovery problem. By creating platforms tailored to mobile — not just extended to mobile — these social giants are grabbing a huge share of attention, limiting the mobile opportunity for news organizations.  And as we learned from the shift from newspapers to the Internet, catching up is very difficult.

Second, Facebook’s numbers hint that there’s a shift among a growing audience from desktop-centric behavior to mobile first.  By extension, desktop consumption will decline.  Google is already seeing it: four straight months of a decline in desktop search (Google expects mobile traffic to surpass desktop later this year.).  While both Google and Facebook are monetizing this mobile shift — they dominate a large majority of all mobile ad dollars spent — news organizations are not. 

At least yet.  And simply shifting display ads to mobile is not the answer.

That’s why I’ve been pounding the drum for news organizations to throw ourselves at mobile, tripling the investment and shifting our newsroom cultures to “mobile first.” (See my earlier post, “Why mobile will disrupt journalism like the Internet did a decade ago.”)  After all, the mobile revolution isn’t coming; it’s already here.

(Full disclosure: I’m GM of Breaking News, a mobile-first startup owned by NBC News. Here’s our approach to mobile.)

I watched the live stream of the Media Impact Forum today — an event held at Stanford — which highlighted how innovative companies are measuring the “social impact” of their work.  I couldn’t help but think about how the same approach could be adapted to journalism. 

“You put [the story] out there, but does anyone care?” asked Neal Baer, best known for his role as producer and writer of ER.  A doctor himself, Baer integrated valuable medical information in the show. But he asked, “How do you go from inspiration to action?”  How do you know that it actually made a difference?

Baer has been thinking about this since his ER days when he participated in a groundbreaking study (.pdf) that measured whether ER viewers took action after watching a show.  In fact, one in seven regular ER viewers contacted a medical professional about something they saw on the show.  That’s an incredible impact for a TV drama.

Journalists intuitively know that their best stories make a difference.  NYT’s David Bornstein, who founded the “Solutions Journalism Network,” says he often asks journalists what story they’re most proud of. “And almost always it was a story they wrote that had a positive social impact,” he explained at the Media Impact Forum.  

But social impact is difficult to measure and often anecdotal in nature. If we were able to measure a story’s impact in real numbers, we’d redefine engagement from questionable metrics like time spent and social sharing to something much more concrete: action.  Then we’d be able to optimize stories around impact, covering and showcasing stories that make the biggest difference in our communities.

Perhaps the same model could be applied to native advertising, too.

So, how would we measure something like this?  We’re starting to see some amazing innovation in the startup space.  For example, NexLeaf.org uses mobile phones as networked measurement devices, crunching real-time data to draw scientific conclusions on the impact of non-profit projects.  Neighborland encourages neighbors to take on community causes, gain support and take action — which Neighborland tracks on a list of accomplishments.  VolunteerMatch has calculated its “social value” by determining how much money non-profits save by using the service to find volunteers (over $600 million a year.)  And ImpactStory provides a way for companies to showcase their impact metrics in real time.

There still isn’t a trusted set of “impact metrics” for journalism, but as I’ve written before, I believe newsrooms must help create that connection by including action paths from current storytelling.   If we enable consumers to take action directly from stories — when they care the most — then we’re increasingly able to measure a given story’s impact. 

Such a connection often frightens journalists who feel that adding points of action to a story feels like advocacy.  But MIT Civic Media Lab’s Ethan Zuckerman calls such a defense an “allusion of objectivity,” arguing that news organizations have a social responsibility to help citizens become active participants.  If we take change seriously, “we need to accept that participatory media is more than participating in making media,” he said at a recent conference. “Could we find ways to get people excited that they wouldn’t just get informed but join a movement and take action?”

I couldn’t agree more, and I believe there are ways to provide measurable paths of action that protect objectivity.  Together with mobile, it’s nothing less than the next frontier of journalism.