Why mobile first is not 'meaningless'

Speaking at the Mobile World Congress, Financial Times’ CTO John O’Donovan said the term mobile first has become meaningless. “Focusing too much on one thing can lead to being obsessed with the things mobile can do” instead of seeing the bigger picture, he warned.  The FT uses a “universal publishing” approach.

Similarly, others have argued that the best, most holistic strategy is “platform appropriate,” optimizing for each screen.  “Who are we to say what screen is first?” said Meredith Artley, managing editor of CNN Digital.

From a consumer standpoint, they’re right.  We should be doing everything.  But for the vast majority of newsrooms with limited resources and tightly-bound cultures, mobile first is a rallying cry to aggressively turn the Titanic before it’s too late.

In news, culture is everything.  Over a decade ago, the industry saw the internet as just another distribution channel – another screen – instead of a disruptive new way of doing business.  Without the urgency, changes were made too slowly, too tentatively, and the rest is history.

If it’s just another thing, you won’t change fast enough.

Today, Facebook, Google and Twitter are dominating the mobile news and information space by making it their top priority – accelerating cultural changes, making bold new bets ($9 billion!?) and generating real revenue – while news organizations argue over which screen is more appropriate.

“We come to mobile like this is just another platform, we’ve seen radio go to television, we’ve seen print go to Web,” explains Michael Zimbalist, SVP of ad products and R&D at NY Times. “I would sort of challenge everyone to think of mobile as a platform shift of a different order, because we’ve never seen a platform shift that’s invaded people’s lives in such a profound way.”

Mobile first isn’t about abandoning the desktop, it’s about accelerating culture change to adapt to the fastest shift in consumer behavior in the history of journalism. It doesn’t matter what you believe, it matters what you can do.  Mobile first is an urgent call to rethink our priorities, invest in new capabilities, relentlessly experiment and redefine success metrics to succeed in a radically new marketplace.

If “mobile first” forces news organizations to focus too much on mobile, so be it.  Because the alternative is a second wave of disruption and decline.