To best adapt to the advent of the digital age, newspapers should target mobile platforms as a means of distributing information, writes Art Howe, CEO of Verve Wireless. Howe says that newspapers are best suited to the mobile platform, and vice versa.

"The paradox of mobile content is that the more local information is (and that's what newspapers can do best), the more valuable it is," Howe writes.

Howe believes that the mobile platform and the newspaper industry could enjoy a mutually symbiotic relationship. For mobile users, a newspaper's "institutional knowledge of the community" makes it best suited to provide the timely, hyperlocal news that readers seek.

And for newspapers, accessing the mobile network would allow them to tap into the world's largest, most lucrative advertising market.

"There are now 3.3 billion active cell phones on the planet. That's three times the number of people hooked into the regular Internet," Howe writes. "And, for a vast majority of young people - the ones whom newspapers desperately need to reach - mobile is the primary communication device."

For Howe, newspapers and mobile users are the perfect match.

"The world's cell phone carriers see their future primarily as a provider of data services," he writes, "Exactly the kind of news, reviews, photos, social guidance, and advertising that newspapers happen to have available."

Source: Editor and Publisher