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The smartphone promises a new golden age of journalism.
...Journalism, however, is holding its own. Statistics from the Times say roughly half of the people who read it now do so with their mobile devices, and that jibes with figures from the latest Pew report on the news media broadly. But if you were to assume that means people have given up reading actual articles and are just snacking instead, you'd be wrong.
The Atlantic recently reported that a gorgeously illustrated 6,200-word story on BuzzFeed—which likewise gets about half its readers through mobile devices—not only received more than a million views, it held the attention of smartphone users for an average of more than 25 minutes. (WIRED's in-depth web offerings have also attracted audiences. A profile of a brilliant Mexican schoolgirl garnered 1.2 million views, 25 percent of them from phones, and readers spent an average of 18 minutes on it.)
Little wonder that for every fledgling enterprise like Circa, which generates slick digests of other people's journalism on the theory that that's what mobile readers want, you have formerly short-attention-span sites like BuzzFeed and Politico retooling themselves to offer serious, in-depth reporting. “Maybe we're entering into a new golden age of journalism,” venture capitalist Marc Andreessen mused in a recent blog post, “and we just haven't recognized it yet.”...
Here's a good read and some interesting reflections on mobile phones and the past and future for journalism .