Newspapers: Responsive vs. Mobile

These days, this seems to be the biggest conundrum newspapers face, to create a responsive site, or a mobile form factor.

On one hand, responsive gives newspapers an all in one model, whichever device your readers use, the content fits the frame. It's more difficult to set up, and to make sure your images fit within the constraints of phone, tablet, phablet, and the new mega form factors, but some easy HTML and CSS tricks make sure you are smooth in your transitions and fitting the standard grids.

On the other hand, it seems we are spending a lot of time and effort selling mobile specific ads to clients, and probably in the most unproductive way ever seen.

A current trend in the industry is to sell the standard Medium Rectangle size (300x250) as a mobile ad position. We want to place 3-4 of these on each page and pretend we are servicing customers in this fashion.

Point A: While they do fit the page, these are not mobile ads. They are repurposed ads that do nothing different or dynamic.

Point B: When and if we do make a transition to a responsive site, we won't have mobile specific ad positions available. The responsive site will display the same blocks, for lack of a better terms, that the desktop would show, just in a different order/sequence to fit the form of the mobile device.

So when you consider point A and point B together, you are have to ask why we are pushing for mobile specific, if we intend to eventually be responsive? Aren't we really selling contracts for ads that we won't be service at some point in the future?

Obviously, the contractual ad agreement problem makes the timing of a changeover to a responsive site more difficult. Either the contract needs to be re-negotiated/amended, or we need to hold off on flipping that switch until all the contracts have expired, leaving us with a gap of time in which we just can't sell new contracts for those spots.

Equally obvious is the flip side of the coin... perhaps we won't ever go responsive. Perhaps the solution is to continue to developer mobile versions of the website, and sell the ads as an independent entity, with the understanding that we are not best serving our customers needs.

That's, for me at least, a hard pill to swallow, but one which I can manage to choke down if that is the decision from on high.

The advantages of responsive design are clear, the disadvantages of mobile sites are also clear, but this is obviously not a purely tech based argument when you consider the need to service the ads that your ad department can and will sell. It becomes a rather bitter tasting stew where everything and anything get thrown into the pot until your are left with a nourishing if less than tasty dinner.

There is no one size fits all solution in the newspaper business. Community newspapers are the heart and soul of news, small papers with circulations of 5,000-25,000 readers. You can find national news all over the internet, but finding that small community news that delivers school board meetings, city council notes, and pictured of Fred's large mouthed mass require a dedicated home grown footprint.

And each community is vastly different from the next, which means advertising needs to meet the demands of a specific set of businesses and markets. And with that, the one size fits all cookie cutter approach to building websites is null and void.

But so many newspapers are part of a larger print family of newspapers where a team has the mandate to try and make each site within the company as cookie cutter as possible, under the belief that we can template everything and make it all fit any of our communities.

Wow, it's hard to imagine a better recipe for digital failure. But with net revenues still being such a small chunk of the pie compared to print, it's also equally difficult to invest capital into an area that isn't paying the bills.

Luckily for me, I am not responsible for the development of a family of sites. I am responsible for one site, and have been able to tailor the content to what my sales team feels it can sell. We are planning a move to a fully responsive site in the coming months, and there will be extreme challenges since we also have been selling mobile specific ads.

It's a discussion I do not look forward to.