From Michael Depp, NetNewsCheck.com
When serious storms hit Washington, D.C., this summer, WTOP realized the power of the app.
“It happened on a Friday night, and everybody’s power went out,” said John Meyer, director of digital media at the news radio station.
“People couldn’t go to their computers and they may or may not have radios, but everyone had their phones. It was really a wake up for us because this was the first event where we were really positioned to have a product that could solve people’s need for information.
“We saw our mobile usage go up 30% that night.”
WTOP, which is owned by Hubbard Media, had been in the smartphone space before with a previous iteration of its app, but the station jettisoned it in favor of pushing its mobile site. The new app, which was released this summer as “The Glass-Enclosed News App,” is actually a hybrid of the two.
That means that after viewers open up a native app home page, various interior pages actually open up a mobile browser inside of the app’s frame and lead users to the mobile site. The reason for this approach was pragmatic, Meyer said.
The back-end difficulty of serving ads across multiple platforms and devices was part of that. “It was becoming too complicated to have all of these various entry points,” he said.
By keeping most of the app’s content based in the mobile site, which ties directly to WTOP’s proprietary CMS, Meyer said it also allows the newsroom to make more changes on the fly.
Paul Jacobs VP and GM of Jacobs Media, which designed the app, said his company is increasingly taking this approach to design. “Particularly when you’re dealing with something in real time like traffic or even weather, it’s just very smooth to pull up a mobile webpage very quickly and conveniently,” he said. “If we can leverage the benefits of both [native apps and mobile Web], why not?”
Meyer said that about 10% of WTOP’s digital traffic comes in through mobile right now, a number that’s growing. And part of what’s drawing that traffic is traffic itself — that is the literal roadway kind, which in Washington, D.C., is some of the nation’s worst.
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