By JASON COLLINGTON Web Editor on Feb 9, 2012, at 9:33 AM Updated on 2/21 at 9:05 AM
PRESS FORWARD
On April 2, we launched a new look of our website with a lot of ideas from readers.
Now that we are a month into it, ...
We have made a couple of adjustments to the site since we launched the new look on April 2. We appreciate the feedback and ...
The latest version of our iPad app is now available from the App Store and it includes a popular request.
You no longer ...
App-wise, we are on the iPad, our Android app works on the Amazon Fire and we are holding off on a Nook app.
The question was a simple one, but I needed a moment.
The reporter from
Editor & Publisher asked me this: "What do you see for the future of newspaper apps at the Tulsa World?"
Like they say, I am bad at predictions especially when they are about the future. Five years ago, we didn't know we all wanted an iPad. Asking about the future makes for easy questions, but whenever I listen to how my heroes answer them I like how they reflect for a moment and then explain that they have no idea.
My answer when a little like this: As the audience changes their habits, so should the industry that needs their attention to communicate news and information. For now, that means optimizing our content for an
iPad app. It means offering a
Kindle edition. What I know is that each time we offer our content on another platform, we do it because there is an audience who wants to find us there. Each time, I have emailed those who contacted me first wanting to know when we would be on Android and such.
How has our audience responded? Close to 44,000 downloads of our iPad and iPhone apps. Readership on all of our digital products are up, year over year.
I love that our leadership team is quick to say we are going to move smarter, not faster, when it comes to the new technological fad of the month. We are not a huge company. We have to pick targets and focus on the right ones because I can tell you these new platforms take a lot of time to learn. Luckily, our programming and development team is in all in-house. Web Developer George Gianopoulos earned the name iGeorge for his work on our apps. He's a Microsoft veteran who has worked hard to learn the languages of Android and Apple.
Personally, I have a wife who doesn't read us in print. She reads everything on our iPhone app. It fits her lifestyle and time schedule. That's what we have found with a lot of our readers. It's not that they don't want to read the news, it's just they want to pick the way it best suits them. That's why we live in a world of 36 varieties of tomato sauce and 10 different kinds of Ranch salad dressing (by my last count). We are just at the beginning of the variety revolution in the news business and apps are a part of that.
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