“The battle will be won on the smartphone,” New York Times CEO Mark Thompson said at a tech conference last February.

The paper’s readers have increasingly been coming from mobile in recent years, and the Times has responded with a fleet of apps designed to draw in small, niche audiences to the paper. The NYT Cooking app, an opinion app, and NYT Now, which offers a single curated news feed, were designed mostly as evangelical products—to convert browsers into regular readers and eventually subscribers.

But these niche apps haven’t attracted the number of subscribers the Times was hoping for. The paper shuttered the opinion app in October, and last week it announced a retooling of its mobile apps. The NYT Now app, which had required a paid monthly subscription, will be free, while the paper’s comprehensive iPhone app is undergoing a transition to make it “more visual, more serendipitous, and to introduce a new mobile voice.” That new mobile voice will come from human editors, which the app is getting for the first time.

Read more

There is tremendous transition within the field of journalism. The number of full-time U.S. daily newspaper journalists now stands roughly at 36,700, according to the American Society of News Editors, down from 55,000 in 2008. I constantly receive calls from journalism colleagues who are in transition and grappling with how to move forward with their expertise. For any journalist who is in a state of transition, it is tremendously useful to know how to build on an idea and scale it into a business.

I am fortunate to teach entrepreneurship at the Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Each semester I break the class into three teams and ask thought leaders in journalism, technology, and communications to share a real-life challenge they see within our industry. These thought leaders have recently included Chris Crommett, founder of CNN en Español; Louis Libin, former CTO of NBC and president of Broad Comm; and Marian Salzman, CEO of Havas PR.