Inside Forbes: A Rallying Cry For Our Times -- 'Go Mobile Or Go Home'

I remember the scene like it was yesterday. The ground floor conference room in AOL's Dulles, Va., headquarters looked out over a parking lot. The curtains had that Motel 6 feel. The folding chairs were beyond uncomfortable. And the coffee that frigid morning was awful. Almost 15 years ago, about 75 AOLers gathered to hear that broadband would one day take over and that we needed to get in the game. No one listened, no one cared. The journalists yawned. The VP's counted their option grants. The marketing folks fantasized about blitzing America -- again -- with sign-up discs. Worry about broadband? Dial-up subscriptions were strong, business was great. We should have paid attention. Within years, AOL became an also ran in a high-speed universe.

Fast-forward to the mobile era, now much further along in mind, spirit and usage than broadband was back then. Today, 50% or more of visitors to most news sites, Forbes.com included, arrive via mobile devices, mostly smartphones. What happens if 75%, 90%, even 100% of our audience goes mobile. What if consumers want mobile native stories -- bursts of information, not an endless string of paragraphs? Can't happen? With my AOL experience top of mind, I'm not betting against it. That's why we held a 100% Mobile Day at FORBES last Friday. Nearly 100 people, slightly less than a third of our company, signed up to attend -- and most showed up. Unlike that AOL broadband meeting,  FORBES staffers came with enthusiasm -- to learn, dream and share ideas with colleagues.

Mobile Day was about a device, but also a building reality: the news industry is quivering again.  Apple and Google are at war. Will apps or the Web win the day? Each giant is tossing bombs, shaking the ground that publishers and advertisers walk on. Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter are firing their own salvos, carving out professional news zones within their products that pose a threat (or is it an opportunity?) to traditional publishers and startups alike. Ad blocking, programmatic buying, native advertising and those much-hated display ads bring other complications.

Rather than strike a new round of fear, these industry trends energized staffers. They recognized we were turning to them to lead a discussion about the future of FORBES. The millennials in the room, the most social/mobile consumers of all, especially rose to the occasion. The veterans knew this kind of get together (journalists, sales people and developers working side-by-side) wouldn't happen at other traditional media organizations. At one point, someone announced: "Go mobile or go home."

The Mobile Day invite went companywide and was short and sweet: bring your creative minds, we'll supply the paper and pencils. We began at 10am with a mobile overview (I couldn't resist going back in time, playing snippets of the Googlezon Flash movie), then focused on how competitors were responding to the smartphone audience. Next we handed out five FORBES posts and asked participants to squeeze and reconfigure the content into a series of mobile screens. After some pizza, editors and reporters and members from the product, design, sales, PR, Tech, business and marketing teams organically formed 16 three-to-four person teams and scattered to work stations throughout our Jersey City office. Many worked on the project for three hours before each team got five minutes to present their work to the entire group. Throughout this post I've scattered six of the 39 work sheets that were displayed on a projector with -- you guessed  it -- a mobile phone.

Taken as a whole, the design formats presented overlapping themes. Many were visually heavy. Others included fluid user interfaces with shareable elements, personalization, split screens, annotation, and photo backgrounds. Some included aggregation. A few went to the heart of the matter: mobile specific content. And there was much more.

This week, the office is still buzzing about Mobile Day, which was spearheaded by our new mobile accelerator unit. At least a half dozen people stopped me to say how important it was to them. In an email to a colleague of mine, one said: "I feel as though it is extremely rare for any company in this day and age to seek out all of their employees to come together and collaborate with one another in the way in which we did today. From my perspective, it certainly made me feel as though I was helping to contribute to the much bigger picture."

Mobile is one of the biggest challenges the news industry faces right now. Coming up with fresh formats to replace the digital article screen, still more or less a copy of the newspaper page, is vital. So is the need to develop mobile first publishing systems. That's why more 100% Mobile Days are ahead of us. I can see one focused on creating mobile specific content, an effort that attacks 100 years of journalistic storytelling head-on. Another could reimagine what native advertising looks like on small screens. Maybe another could do the unthinkable -- make display ads work for consumers. What Mobile Day #1 proved to me is this: the answers we need lie within our company. We plan to take that and run with it.