Voices from the Past: promotional idea uses cell phones and radio-on-demand
April 2010
Clyde Bentley
Mobile phones are the most widely used communications technology in the United States – nearly 90% of Americans carry one. But the vast majority of those phones cannot receive the Web-based graphics and information that media outlets prefer. The Smartphones that can do that represent just 17% of the cell phones in the U.S. The rest just communicate primarily with voice and text. The iPhone, by the way, accounts for just 4.3% of mobile phones.
Most of us in the mass media would like to address the mobile boom by offering an iPhone or Android app, but that clearly misses the bulk of our audience.
We need to look at a different form of journalism – we usually think of convergence journalism as video and online, but there is also a strong relationship between print and mobile audio.
