Those immobile newspaper companies

One of the truisms of digital journalism, and one that happens to be true, is that mobile is a big part of the future of news, if it isn’t the future. The latest Pew “State of the Media” report goes on at length about the migration of news to mobile in a section titled, aptly, “Digital: As Mobile Grows Rapidly, the Pressures on News Intensify.” Here are the numbers, according to Pew: Thirty-one percent of adults now own a tablet, roughly triple May 2011 levels; 45 percent of adults own a smartphone, up 10 percentage points from May 2011; Apple sold 65.7 million iPads worldwide last year, around 62 percent of the tablet market, with plenty of competitors accounting for the rest. Pew says that’s a good thing for news. So readers are ready for mobile news. Fine. But are newspaper companies ready to deliver it? For the large majority of them, the answer is no.