February 15, 2013
The Wall Street Journal, a crown jewel in Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, has launched a mobile Website for the iPhone that continues its 360-degree embrace of digital media because the new business model for publishing.
Starting this week, subscribers to WSJ’s digital package can access business news, analysis, insights, images and videos on WSJ.com on their iPhone, with a glance and feel that mirrors the publication’s highly popular mobile application. However, this isn’t responsive design as you recognize it.
“This is an strategy to responsive design that we call intentional design – design for the user experience in each environment,” said Daniel Bernard, chief product officer of The Wall Street Journal Digital, Long island.
“We believe the Wall Street Journal might be available everywhere, whether or not it’s an app, mobile Site, tablet app or Website online on a working laptop or computer,” he said. “And the hot button is designing for the user experience in that environment.”
Mutual benefits
The mobile site, accessed at wsj.com – which takes visitors to m.wsj.com – bears the stamp of the Journal online: color scheme, fonts, specialize in hard business news and, for sure, the trenchant opinion and analysis. Links to the newest headlines and the most well liked articles sit below the Journal logo.
Daniel Bernard is chief product officer of The Wall Street Journal Digital
Navigation too is designed to be intuitive – a lesson learned from the Journal’s apps for cellphones and tablets across platforms reminiscent of the iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows and BlackBerry.
Tapping at the navigation button to the left of the publication’s logo results in a dropdown menu with sections for the newest headlines, world, U.S., The big apple and business. Much more section links appear on the bottom of every page.
WSJ will serve ads on its mobile site using DoubleClick, that is the identical ad server it uses for its PC Website online. The goal is to let advertisers make cross-channel buys for banner ads across article and section pages, in addition to rich media executions.
Financial services firm Northwestern Mutual is likely one of the early advertisers at the mobile site, inviting readers to click a banner tile to locate their financial security score.
All development was done in-house.
“It feels very appy,” Mr. Bernard said of your entire mobile site experience. “This is our first iteration and we will continue to adapt.
“We support rich media and we are willing to work with advertisers to create the appropriate solutions they want,” he said.
Filing away
Overall, the positioning looks simple. But which is intentional. WSJ resisted the urge to pour the full PC site onto mobile, keeping in mind user needs after they are on smartphones and tablets.
The formula behind the site’s architecture was three-fold: maintaining the editorial hierarchy, offering the appropriate advertising experience and appropriate asset delivery to circumvent overload and placement usability issues.
“This is our first step to being fully responsive,” Mr. Bernard said. “Shortly, we’ll launch a website for Android devices.”
The logic for the Android mobile site would be the same because the iPhone’s. The thought is to deliver to an iPhone user the iPhone HTML5 file when she or he pulls up WSJ.com.
WSJ has apps for the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android smartphones, and for the iPad, Windows and Android-based Kindle Fire tablets. The publication serves up the computer Web page on tablet, although that will change sooner or later.
The WSJ mobile site is subscription-enabled, maintaining the identical ration of free versus locked articles as online.
A monthly subscription is $21.99 for digital access to the Wall Street Journal Digital Network properties which include WSJ.com, MarketWatch.com, Barrons.com, Allthingsd.com and SmartMoney.com. Combined, these titles boast 1.3 million paid digital subscribers.
The Journal doesn’t escape mobile subscriber numbers for public consumption.
More Journal entries
Part of reports Corp.’s Dow Jones & Co., WSJ was probably the most pioneers in publishing to adopt a paid subscription model online.
Not only is the print Journal the biggest newspaper nationwide, however the digital version also leads in online subscriptions, rivaled perhaps by The brand new York Times.
Now, as consumers migrate their media and content consumption habits to smartphones and tablets, publications are forced to modify strategy.
While apps get the thrill, many publishers are realizing that the mobile Web is the reliable workhorse for news delivery outside of the platform-specific app world of walled gardens.
Being inside the vanguard buys WSJ lead time. Its first BlackBerry mobile experience debuted nearly six years ago – prior to the iPhone’s launch.
The company has a term for its digital embrace: WSJ Everywhere.
“This rounds out our user offering,” Mr. Bernard said of the mobile site. “They can leverage apps, mobile Web, tablets and the regular Web and we’re going to maintain building and innovating.
“We’re going where the users are,” he said.