REVIEW: Mobile news sites offer headlines, and not much else

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly feature, Yay or Nay. Every week we’ll review a new wireless application or service from the user’s point of view, with the goal of highlighting what works and what doesn’t. If you wish to submit your application or service for review, please contact us at [email protected].
Application: Mobile Web sites from the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.
Running on: BlackBerry Pearl with service from Sprint Nextel
Yay: The sites provided quick access to the day’s top headlines, and in some cases were more easily readable than the desktop alternative. The New York Times stood out with videos and a handful of mobile-specific services.
Nay: In terms of interactive features and graphical information, all of the sites were pale shadows of their desktop computer counterparts. Further, many useful and interesting features – such as job listings and reader comments – were not available via mobile. Though we suppose we shouldn’t be surprised at that.
We say: The mobile Web sites of the nation’s largest print news publications offered a quick glimpse at top headlines – and not much else.
Review: As troubles mount in the print news industry, many publications have been putting extra emphasis on their digital products, including their Web sites. However, it seems these efforts largely haven’t transferred into the mobile realm.
What was most striking about the mobile Web sites from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post was how similar they were. Each featured a few top stories, followed by specific news categories and their respective headlines – “Hoping to Draw Market Share With Touch Screens” in the “Technology” section, for example.
The Washington Post offered perhaps the most basic mobile Web site among the three. The site, http://mobile.twp.com, was simply a list of headlines and news categories, with a search box at the bottom. The Washington Post’s desktop Web site offers a variety of interesting, interactive features, but that was not evident on the publication’s mobile site.
Perhaps the biggest drawback to the Washington Post’s mobile site was the “next page” function. On any article longer than 400 words or so (meaning, most of them) we had to click through a number of pages to read a full story. We suppose this feature was intended to speed page downloads or serve up extra ads, but we found that it ultimately detracted from the overall experience.
The Wall Street Journal’s mobile Web site, available from a mobile device at WSJ.com, offered a few extra perks to the basic layout, including a stock info search box at the top of the page, photos with most news stories, and an “e-mail to a friend” function at the bottom of each article.
Thankfully, the Wall Street Journal site displayed each article on a single page, requiring only one click per story.
The standout of the group was the New York Times, available at http://mobile.nytimes.com. The site offered the standard search function and list of articles, but threw in features including podcasts, a most-popular-articles listing, photo galleries and videos. The site even included a number of mobile specific-features, like movie showtimes and real-estate listings. We were especially impressed with the timely “holiday recipes” function, which allowed mobile surfers to browse turkey-related recipes or search for specific cooking ideas.
We understand that a news publication’s mobile site must strike a careful balance between providing timely information and meeting the requirements of small screens and weak processors. And we did note a number of wireless efforts beyond the mobile Web site, such as text alerts and iPhone applications. But we hope that such publications continue to expend efforts on wireless, particularly in the face of increasing consumer interest in smartphones, 3G and mobile in general.