By: Karim Mostafa Companies Move Content To Palm Pilots, Phones
With wireless as the hot new means of content distribution, newspaper
companies are jumping onto bandwidth quickly.
KnightRidder.com this week announced that its Real Cities network has
partnered with Palm Inc. to distribute local news on Palm's handheld
devices. By the end of this summer, some new Palm devices will feature
content from some of Real Cities' 36 city and regional sites.
The New York Times Co. piped in with its own announcement that i3
Mobile will help the company create a wireless portal. The New York
Times Digital content (including news, stocks, movie reviews,
restaurant information, and sports scores) will be available on mobile
phones supporting SMS (Short Messaging Service) and WAP (Wireless
Application Protocol).
Getting these deals early on is especially important when exclusivity
plays a part. KnightRidder.com is the exclusive provider to Palm for
its Local News Channel. AvantGo remains the primary distributor of Real
Cities content for mobile phones.
Pulling together as a network is the key to wireless. '[The wireless
industry] feels like the Internet three years ago,' says Dan Finnigan,
CEO of KnightRidder.com. Finnigan says KnightRidder.com's strategy is
to jump in early.
'We have to make distribution deals to get more markets and we need
more markets to get distribution deals,' Finnigan says. He says Palm
liked the Real Cities network because it carries local news providers
beyond Knight Ridder newspapers. The Real Cities Network includes Web
sites from Central Newspapers, Belo, and Macromedia Inc. And Knight
Ridder continues to invite other company's newspapers to join.
The Palm deal doesn't require much work for Real Cities' affiliates,
Finnigan says. KnightRidder.com has written programs that take content
from the affiliates' Web sites and reformat it for the Palm VII
wireless platform. Affiliate Web sites have to maintain the local news
updates.
Besides the wireless area, KnightRidder.com is spending more time
talking to broadband content providers. 'There isn't a day that goes by
that we're not talking to somebody,' says Finnigan, who believes the
demand for local news will only increase as consumers increase their
use of the Internet and wireless platforms.
'The time has never been better for us as an industry,' Finnigan says.
As Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman and publisher of The New York
Times, said earlier this year, content providers have to be
agnostic in regards to distribution.
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