What kind of mobile content gets people excited? Is it ad-supported weather videos? Maybe full-length movies? It’s too early to say. I can only speak for myself - and I prefer content that makes my life richer and more exciting. Something that adds colour to it instead of facilitating an escape, Second Life-style.

Helping me discover local events, local news, local people worth my attention is one way to do that. Traditionally, small and medium-sized local newspapers and radio-stations had to do that job. Now, as their audiences dwindle, these media outlets look at mobile as a possible revenue source, rather than a key to transformation and relevancy. Does anybody even need radio when news appear faster on Twitter, traffic information is always on Google Maps and Perez Hilton has all the gossip? Yes, but like Richard has stated in his previous post, the media ecology has changed.

There are several strategic things a small media outlet can do to build a truly useful web/mobile portal to last through the next decade.

• Get really good at syndicating local user-generated content. It’ll be a while before Google or another big company can do this well, globally. Meanwhile, I would like to see worthwhile twitter messages, flickr pictures and blog posts coming from great local people I’ve never met - all available in one place, with little noise.
• Keep writing about and reviewing local events, venues, restaurants - and make the results available in all mediums. Great writers work in great newspapers - so why restrict them to just print? User ratings are great, but opinions of experts are often even more important. Once the piece is done - let the readers know no matter what social network / IM client / mobile phone they are using.
• Change frequency to “daily” and “hourly”. Mobile content has to be very timely and because of that, traditional weekly/biweekly cycles do not apply. Make sure the news staff micro-blogs to the portal - not all interesting things make it to the final edition!
• Try to guess the immediate location of the reader and adjust to that. People like me (car-less digital nomads) want hyperlocal content - information about objects, events and people in their immediate vicinity or a walking distance away. While the technical means for that are still being improved (GPS, triangulation, location tags etc), this helps to take out the “search” step from the mobile experience.

The future of smaller media outlets lies in migrating to digital and doing the difficult job of supplying people with relevant local and hyperlocal content. Let’s make it happen!