First, the stats from wikipedia (not the best source I know):

An increasing number of countries, particularly in Europe, now have more mobile phones than people. According to the figures from Eurostat, the European Union’s in-house statistical office, Luxembourg had the highest mobile phone penetration rate at 158 mobile subscriptions per 100 people (158%), closely followed by Lithuania and Italy.[7] In Hong Kong the penetration rate reached 139.8% of the population in July 2007.[8] Over 50 countries have mobile phone subscription penetration rates higher than that of the population and the Western European average penetration rate was 110% in 2007 (source Informa 2007). The U.S. currently has one of the lowest rates of mobile phone penetrations in the industrialized world at 85%.

A recent article in The New York Times about newspapers on cellphones had this statement from, “Tim Repsher, who oversees Media General’s mobile products, said he chose Verve because he would not have to hire new staff members to figure out how to publish newspapers on cellphones. Mobile readership quadrupled in a year”

Now, my question is this. If you are already giving away content for free online, outsourcing delivery, partnering with Yahoo on ad placement and classified ads, and losing paid print readership without creating a new deliverable, are you still a newspaper? Or are you a collection of freelance journalists?

What if Media General had hired staff to develop a cell phone application? Their ROI would be higher. They may even have come up with an application to sell others. We’ll never know I guess. What is the cost / benefit of outsourcing a service you think is integral to the viability of your organization? That doesn’t make any sense to me.And as for “quadrupling the mobile readership in one year”, what does that even mean? Did you go from 1 person to 4? Tell us what your penetration in the market is.

Tell us what you really paid for…