My job as an online editor at a traditional newspaper company involves a lot of convincing…that is, convincing print journalists to rework their content so it is not just “on the web” but “of the web.” Same can be said of designing content for mobile media. Content should be tweaked to take advantage of the unique constraints and abilities of the platform that delivers their information.
So, for example, a 1,000 word story that works well in print, would not be the same if it was produced for TV, would need to be altered to be broadcast on the radio and could be different online in a desktop browser. What if the same story is accessed by someone on a mobile phone? The traditional print version wouldn’t be ideal, nor any of the other iterations on TV, radio or online. It is best if the content is fine-tuned to fit the mobile browsers capabilities.
Questions to answer first: Who is the audience for this product and what are their expectations? What content is relevant to the mobile user to fulfill their expectations? How can this information be beneficial to someone on the go? How can it be easily viewed and consumed on a small screen?
With so much information available at people’s fingertips these days, publishing content in any medium seems to be pointless unless an audience actually can access it with the least amount of stress, and find it useful.