Inside Forbes: Three Charts Show How the Mobile Audience Will Change Journalism

I recently did a Q & A with our new crop of summer interns -- 30 or so college students winding their way to some kind of gainful employment. At one point, I told them they needed to live the digital life 24/7 to succeed in today's news business (I'm not big on the work-life balance thing). For me, living that life increasingly means drilling into Google Analytics round-the-clock. Right now, my focus is mobile data.

Here are three charts for current and would-be journalists to ponder. The top two speak to the future -- how the convergence of social and mobile influences the life span of a post. The Forbes.com post on employee compensation was shared 170,000 times. Notice the mobile-desktop page view split and how it played out over a week. Our post on athlete earnings, with only 4,500 shares, followed a similar pattern. The third chart reflects an older era, or at least one that will end sooner than most think. The throat cancer story started and finished via Yahoo , rising dramatically, then disappearing. Its traffic was mostly desktop, likely speaking to the age and workplace composition of the portal's audience. The post's 5,700 shares, proportionally much lower than the other two stories, also indicates a mobile-first audience is far more inclined to share than desktop users.

There are many take-aways from this data. It's been clear for some time that social equals content discovery. Now it's just as evident that mobile is a social discovery device that leads to content discovery. Its power lies in diverse connections that form a long tail of interested news consumers. Yahoo tells a different story -- a portal with a less socially engaged crowd, or one without smartphones at the ready. Its desktop power is far more confined to the head of the audience tail. Of course, the case could be made that the first two stories appealed to a younger, mobile crowd and the third to an older, office desktop consumer. I tend to doubt it, given the universal interest in health-care stories.

There's an advertising story in these numbers, too. Emarketer, a trade paper, reports that mobile and tablet advertising will rise $8 billion this year from 2013. That represents an 83% increase, putting  all mobile ad spending ahead of newspapers, magazines and radio and just behind TV and desktops/laptops. Still, mobile ad rates, with video being one of the few exceptions, are lower than desktop rates, which are lower still than print rates. All this hits hard at newsroom economics. As difficult as it is to run traditional newsrooms built on print rates in a desktop world, it will be nearly impossible to do it on mobile revenues.  That is, if profitability is a goal. That's why new labor models are needed to match what marketers are willing to pay for quality content. The FORBES contributor model is one such example.

With some of this as background, our interns asked what I see for them in the next five years. I got the same question from a group of German editors the day before and 200 university professors a few days before that at an Academic Summit in Chicago. My answer: changes in the ad market will mean journalists will be paid differently, perhaps more like contractors than salaried employees, and news organizations will need to monetize mobile content streams to pay them. The interns looked a little scared. The Germans knew what I meant. The teachers, well, they just live in a different world. The good news: consumer demand for quality content is insatiable. Journalists, young or old, who keep an open mind and learn new skills will surely find their way.