This week, a venerable news service – an organization that got its start when four Manhattan daily newspapers agreed in 1846 to pay for dispatches from the Mexican War – took strides toward to the forefront of modern mobile communications by launching new multimedia services for wireless users.

 

Officials with The Associated Press say their new “Mobile News Network” – available now on Virgin Mobile USA handsets – brings local, national, international, business, entertainment, sports and other news from more than 1,000 participating media organizations, supplemented by AP text, photos and videos.

 

To capture Virgin’s younger mobile Web-browsing demographic, two sites, “AP Entertainment” and “Can You Believe It?” – also called “CUBI” and featuring quirky stories – are now accessible by to company customers from the VirginXL on-deck homepage.

 

The Mobile News Network is the first product released by the AP’s so-called “digital cooperative” – an effort designed to bring AP members’ information to new digital outlets. Shown at right on a mobile device, the network is touted by AP officials as a way for local news organizations to increase revenue by introducing interactive content to younger viewers, building brands and offering news around-the-clock.

 

As TMCnet has reported, the mobile Web – widely considered the platform of future telecommunications – is drawing more and more news organizations that long have struggled in an Internet-advertising era to post profit margins of years ago.

 

TMCnet recently had a chance to talk about the AP’s initiative with Virgin Mobile (News - Alert) USA with AP General Manager for Mobile and Emerging Products Jeffrey Litvack.

 

We talked about the Mobile News Network, its target audience and the new gateway sites designed by Virgin.

 

Our exchange follows.

 

 

Jeffrey Litvack (pictured left): The Mobile News Network is a very diverse mobile offering, covering a wide range of subjects and more importantly local news from across the U.S. It is the first product out of the AP’s digital cooperative and aims to meet the needs of mobile digital audience. From the start, the concept of the MNN was premised on the idea that the “user came first,” which meant finding innovative ways to present the breadth and depth of content available from AP and its newspaper members. Launching CUBI and AP Entertainment on Virgin is a natural result of this premise. Working with Virgin, it quickly became evident that Virgin’s audience is most interested in those two areas. This said, both Virgin and the AP wanted to give the user more choices and from these sites the user can access the broader Mobile News Network, and as you put it the “hard news.”

 

 

JL: Virgin and AP worked together to look across our product offerings to find the most relevant information for their users. Virgin drove a lot of these conversations as they understood their audiences best, and in digging in we identified entertainment and Can You Believe It as the most relevant. What’s most important though is that this didn’t preclude the user from getting other news, rather, these were the gateways to engage the Virgin user first and we fully expect them to look across the wider set of our offerings. 

 

 

JL: We are not translating anything from the Web to a smaller screen, rather we start from the smaller screen and figure out from there how best to display the content. There is no such thing as one mobile platform, rather it is hundreds of different devices and screens that we are dealing with. From the start the MNN has been about optimizing the mobile Web experience, distinct from the traditional Internet. The primary driver here is creating a user interface that works with unique features of each phone -- to present the right mix between multimedia assets and news that would provide the experience that helps the user to navigate to the content they are most interested in and then to present it in the most dynamic way possible. To do this we work with Verve Wireless an expert in the delivery of content to multi-screen formats and have hired design engineers to further build templates for different phone and feature sets.

 

 

JL: The mobile Web audience is growing very quickly. The best thing about 2008 for mobile has been the move away from calling it WAP, to calling it mobile web -- something that users can understand and are interested in having. We believe strongly that there should be one news portal and that that portal should be from the sources you trust the most, your local news provider, and this is the right time for the Mobile News Network to become the that portal.

 

 

JL: We are leveraging the staff we already have today and working with our member papers to expand the variety and quantity of materials available through the Mobile News Network.