From England to South Korea to Canada and back to England.

UWO MA Journalism Graduate, Jim Saunders.

Smartphones and their app stores will overtake “prehistoric” newspaper web sites? Jeju, South Korea

Posted on | April 15, 2009 | No Comments

Mark Potts over at Recovering Journalist reports on a Joe Posnanski blog post regarding certain iPhone apps that, when installed, come to resemble a newspaper. “It’s not hard to assemble a varied group of services on an iPhone that match the highly varied menu in a good newspaper—and then exceed it by a mile with timeliness, search, interactivity, and more,” he writes.

What got me most was his comment about newspaper web sites and how they might already be behind the times:

Forget print being antiquated; newspaper sites are essentially prehistoric as well. And newspapers aren’t doing nearly enough with alternate forms of distribution, like e-mail, RSS, SMS messages to cellphones, etc… we haven’t even begun to talk about what newspapers are doing with mobile apps for the iPhone and other devices (not much).

Will we, then, move towards a world without the newspaper web site? A kind of self-assembled mobile news service through smart phone apps?

I’d like to draw attention to the war raging on DVD format at the moment. No, not the recent one that Sony’s Blu-ray won against Toshiba’s HD. But that of Blu-ray against online movie streaming from places like Netflix.


Blu-ray may have won the battle against HD, but will it lose the war to online streaming? And can this be likened to newspaper web sites against increasingly sophisticated smart-phone applications?


Will the consumer step over Blu-ray technology in favour of online streaming? And will consumers begin to step over newspaper web sites in a similar way for a self-assembled news service through smart-phone applications?

We can’t be sure just yet, but what we do know is that Smart-phone uptake continues to grow as do the various app stores associated with each.

***Update***

Just read a new NYT story about the rise of Hyperlocal Journalism in which Web start-ups are creating news detached from the newspaper web site.

Category: Future of Journalism
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