Mobile News

This paper describes ePaper, a research prototype system of a personalized newspaper on a mobile reading device. The ePaper aggregates content (i.e., news items) from various news providers, classifies the news items according to concepts from a news domain ontology, and delivers an electronic newspaper to each subscribed user (reader).The system personalizes the content of the newspaper according to the user’s profiles and preferences by applying ontological content-based and collaborative filtering algorithms. The user’s profile is updated implicitly and dynamically, based on the tracking of their reading. Beyond personalization, the ePaper can also provide the user with a “standard edition” of a selected newspaper, as well as browsing capabilities in a repository of news items. The layout of the newspaper is adapted to the specifications of the reading device and to the user’s preferences. In this overview paper, we highlight the main research challenges involved in the development of ePaper and describe how we addressed them.

Changes in news consumption across the globe show a rapid rise of news audiences accessing stories through their mobile devices, while social media play a huge role in distribution of online news. This paper examines a gamification approach for achieving the ultimate goal of engaging users with a social News Reader application that combines smartphones, social media and gamification in a promising and possibly successful way.

Based on four-wave panel data, this study explored the relationships between different uses of motivational mobile applications and online news engagement. Three motivational mobile application uses-informational, recreational, and relational-were identified and rank-ordered according to respondents' everyday mobile application preferences. Results showed that only relational mobile application use had positive relationships with online news engagement. Results further indicate that over the four-year period examined (2013-2016) only the use of relational mobile application led to continuous growth of online news engagement. This study advances the literature on mobile communication not only by introducing results of a longitudinal study that challenge and support conflicting previous findings but that also provide support for the possibility of the mobile facilitation hypothesis.

This paper identifies news agencies' strategies for diversifying their news products on mobile platforms, regarding the particular features of news agency journalism. Based on recent analyses of journalism produced by agencies in the digital age, their canonical concepts as " news wholesalers " with an economic role in the news distribution are put to the test, as well as and their usual characteristics of speed, centrality and linearity in the face of challenges posed by mobility, that impact both the production routines in newsrooms as their market and customer base. At the end, we draw a structural comparison between mobile apps of five global news agencies (Reuters, AP, AFP, EFE and Lusa), in order to describe how these companies have entered the mobile industry.

O artigo identifica estratégias das agências de notícias para a diversificação de seus produtos jornalísticos em plataformas móveis, à luz das particularidades que caracterizam o jornalismo de agências. Com base em análises mais recentes do jornalismo produzido por agências na era digital, põem-se à prova os conceitos canônicos das mesmas como " atacadistas de notícias " com função econômica na ação de noticiar e suas características de velocidade, centralidade e linearidade em face dos desafios gerados pela mobilidade, que impactam tanto as rotinas de produção nas redações das agências quanto seu mercado e clientela como setor econômico. Faz-se, ao fim, uma comparação estrutural entre aplicativos de plataformas móveis de cinco agências de notícias de porte global (Reuters, AP, AFP, EFE e Lusa), a fim de salientar como estas empresas têm ingressado no segmento mobile.