{"id":539,"date":"2011-11-11T13:53:10","date_gmt":"2011-11-11T20:53:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/journalismthatmatters.org\/seattlejournalismcommons\/?p=539"},"modified":"2011-11-11T13:53:10","modified_gmt":"2011-11-11T20:53:10","slug":"big-questions-from-sic2011-the-seattle-interactive-conference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journalismthatmatters.org\/seattlejournalismcommons\/2011\/11\/11\/big-questions-from-sic2011-the-seattle-interactive-conference\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Questions from #SIC2011 – The Seattle Interactive Conference"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In my first post on the Seattle Interactive Conference<\/a>, I went over some locally developed tools designed <\/strong>to make information more relevant and insightful. Mobile apps like Trover<\/a>, which allows geo-discovery through photos, and Evri<\/a>, which organizes ~15,000 news feeds into a friendly iPad interface, are useful on an individual level. But my concern is:<\/strong><\/p>\n

How can they scale to community heights when it comes to breaking, spreading, and contextualizing important public information?<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is not an easy question. To help answer it, I needed to figure out how the mobile sausage is made. So at SIC, I tracked down <\/strong>John SanGiovanni<\/a>, co-founder of and product design VP for the <\/strong>Zumobi<\/strong><\/a> mobile network.<\/strong> It would be wrong to call Zumobi an \u201cad network,\u201d because while they do serve ads to mobile devices, they also design and build the apps on which the ads run. Right now its \u201cco-publishing network\u201d is being used by some of the biggest heavy hitters in the content world, with clients that range from MSNBC and The Week magazine, to Popular Science, Good Housekeeping, Parenting Magazine, and Motor Trend.<\/p>\n

The good news is that SanGiovanni happily reported financial success on the journalism side of their business.<\/strong> He said their MSNBC app is \u201ca whale\u201d (very profitable) and both the advertisers and the publisher (MSNBC) are happy with the model they\u2019ve set up. It\u2019d be hard not to be, because Zumobi designs and builds the app absolutely free of charge to publishers whom they choose to work with. The company also helps with some of the ad sales, but as a co-publishing network, they expect the publisher to already have a drawer full of dedicated advertisers.<\/p>\n

The not-so-good news is that Zumobi only works with top tier clients and doesn\u2019t have plans to scale down their model to independent and hyperlocal publishers.<\/strong> SanGiovanni assured me he\u2019s a big fan of Maple Leaf Life<\/a> and cares about supporting grassroots journalism, but it\u2019s just not in the cards for Zumobi right now. The company prefers to swim with bigger fish.<\/p>\n

The reason why this is not-so-good news, rather than bad news completely, is that it means there are still entrepreneurial possibilities for co-publishing networks within the mobile hyperlocal space.<\/strong>\ufeff<\/p>\n

[Read More on the Journalism Accelerator<\/a>]<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my first post on the Seattle Interactive Conference, I went over some locally developed tools designed to make information more relevant and insightful. Mobile apps like Trover, which allows geo-discovery through photos, and Evri, which organizes ~15,000 news feeds … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":102,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[54,77,111,113,137,154,172,191],"class_list":["post-539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events-2","tag-good-housekeeping","tag-john-sangiovanni","tag-motor-trend","tag-msnbc","tag-popular-science","tag-seattle-interactive-conference","tag-the-week","tag-zumobi"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journalismthatmatters.org\/seattlejournalismcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journalismthatmatters.org\/seattlejournalismcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journalismthatmatters.org\/seattlejournalismcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journalismthatmatters.org\/seattlejournalismcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/102"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journalismthatmatters.org\/seattlejournalismcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journalismthatmatters.org\/seattlejournalismcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journalismthatmatters.org\/seattlejournalismcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journalismthatmatters.org\/seattlejournalismcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journalismthatmatters.org\/seattlejournalismcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}