Great tips and food for thought about adapting and best use of mobile for news.

"The first step to making your site mobile-friendly is to automatically route mobile visitors to the mobile-friendly version of your content. While it's possible to optimize pages for specific mobile platforms and route accordingly, that can be a complex development headache. A good starting point is to simply have a lean auto-loading mobile version of your site, with an obvious link up top to the full Web version."

"MoFuse.com offers free and premium services that convert your site (or parts of your site, as desired) to auto-detecting mobile versions."

"Also, don't overlook SMS text messaging in your mobile strategy. Experiment with special-interest mobile news or event alerts. (Sports, traffic, and school news are good bets to start.) Also consider how people can interact with your site or news org via SMS — for instance, do you have a shortcode yet?"

"A convergence of factoids seems to point to something inevitable: the future of news delivery is on wireless devices, and those devices will be smartphones, much more than e-readers."

Some Key Stats:
* Nielsen says there are 53.4 million mobile internet users in the U.S. (this would be about 20 percent of the 270.3 million wireless subscribers reported above, but undoubtedly the fraction is growing).
* Of these, 22.3 million are using their mobile phone to access news.
* Half of those (11.6 million) are visiting CNN.com.
* However, among iPhone users, 80 percent are browsing the Web. (And by the way, the price on a basic 3G model just dropped to $99 today.)
* The New York Times iPhone app has been downloaded 2 million times.

Click on link for more stats and analysis. VERY interesting stuff.

"Potentially more promising for the print media is the newly-added ability to purchase content from within iPhone applications. A startup called Scrollmotion demonstrated from Apple's stage its forthcoming reader software and boasted it would offer 50 major magazines, 170 daily newspapers and 1 million books. Esquire, ESPN and Bon Appetit were pictured inside the app.

Magazine and newspaper publishers might prefer to put together their own iPhone store, just as the TV studios set up the video-sharing site Hulu. Apple's terms would let them keep 70 percent of the sale price of their content — a pretty good deal in comparison to selling content on the Kindle, where Amazon and its wireless carrier reportedly keep close to 70 percent of the money."

Great round up of the shifting media biz ecology. My faves:
9. Creating new monopolies
….If you want to thrive in the new environments you have to understand the contexts within which users operate. Search Engine Optimisation is one aspect of that. Social Media Marketing should be another. Understand how one website’s domination of a particular space of the web impacts on your strategies, and acknowledge you no longer control your own destiny….
10. Digitisation and convergence
When everything is digital, new things become possible. Audio, video, text, photography, animation – all becomes 1 and 0. You need to understand the efficiencies that makes possible, from broadcasting live from your mobile phone to releasing images on a Creative Commons licence or publishing raw data to allow users to add value through mashups. The value of your organisation lies not just within its walls but beyond them too.