How Canada's national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, approaches new mobile product development. Includes a detailed look at how it built the politics app under very tight timelines. Presented at MoSo 2011

1. The Globe and Mobile
Craig Saila
@saila
#MoSoGlobe

2. 1) “It’s the journalism, stupid”

3. Woodbridge is David Thomson’s private holding company, and
continues to shelter The Globe and Mail from public markets

4. 85%
Bell Media kept its share of 15 percent

5. In CTVglobemedia, the newspaper was a line item with little chance to
significantly boost the bottom-line

6. The morning newspaper is a ritual and no longer a necessity

7. News is discovered in snippets throughout the day

8. McLuhan was wrong*
*Not really, but the literal interpretation of his soundbite is

10. First mobile apps
iPhone released January 2009
Kindle released November 2009 Gadio/Flickr
Globe2Go iPad app June 2010

11. The Globe is seen in differently throughout the day
depending on time of day, where the reader is
and how much attention the reader can spare

12. 2) Be flexible

13. Development had always been waterfall - and a struggle
but news reporting is essentially an agile process that works

14. Three companies, three apps

17. Base expectations
๏ Election news coverage
๏ Send news alerts
๏ Geo-localized polls
๏ Display #elxn41 posts
๏ Tweet from app
๏ Riding & polling look-up
๏ Individual riding pages

18. Road ahead
1. Have app in market for budget
2. Integrate social media features
3. Build riding pages and lookup
4. Display live election results
5. Promote other apps

19. Aside: the Pearce Tower dropped from the app, but stayed appears in its
icon after a debate about whether it represented Canadian politics

20. Globe Politics landed in the App Store and in BlackBerry World in time
for the budget announcement - beating others to market

21. The Globe and Mail used available inventory and lobbied Apple (and
Blackberry) to ensure approval and promotion efforts were in sync

22. Even before release, we knew we had planned for too much

23. Left behind
๏ Advertising
Not critical for the election, as
politics doesn’t sell well
๏ Tracking
A bigger issue, no data to
compare app vs. web vs. mobile
๏ Alerts
Huge miss, not having
weakened the case for an app

24. The Twitter release
๏ Twitter was a critical part of this
election campaign
๏ Provided better coverage of
continuous news-cycle
๏ Provided basic sharing to help
promote the app & The Globe

25. Clipped
Planned to use lists, editor
curation, and an in-app
community to discover stories
before the larger news cycle

26. Riding page release
๏ Least interesting...
๏ ..but most promising
๏ Lists using local hashtags
๏ Quickly find ridings of interest
๏ and nearest polling stations
๏ Plus local news and results

27. ๏ Mapping to postal code
could not be completed
๏ Which meant geo-
location was too
challenging
๏ Riding look-up was done
by name

28. 3) JSON & the APIs

29. Developers created a new content feed
quickly & outside the normal review process
that changed how The Globe saw its products

30. Infrastructure
Data
Presentation

31. Three simple APIs were used to power the entire election experience

32. The Globe and Mail:
Politics
๏ Released March 2011
๏ Timed to be first in market
๏ Xtreme, forked from News

33. The Globe and Mail:
News
๏ Released April 2011
๏ Released on BB, iPhone, iPad
๏ In-house, with Xtreme dev

34. The Globe and Mail:
Life
๏ Released March 2011
๏ Timed to relaunch of website
๏ Polar Mobile, with RSS

35. (plus one extra)

36. The Globe and Mail:
Royal Wedding
๏ Released April 2011
๏ Was going to be pay app
๏ Huge in Singapore

37. The Globe and Mail:
Business
๏ Coming soon (early alpha)
๏ Charts, stocks, news heavy
๏ In-house, with Five Mobile dev

38. What’s next? Let’s talk

39. Known knowns
๏ Innovate
The Globe is currently
rethinking its entire business
๏ Agility
Spreading beyond digital
๏ Opening data
Foundational APIs are being
refined and used more

40. Thank you
๏ Back-channel: #MoSoGlobe
๏ Twitter: @saila