Mobile is Everything for ESPN, and Soon Will be for Everyone Else

ESPN revolutionized TV. Almost single-handedly, it made cable TV a must-have service for tens of millions of people.

But now ESPN's future is in doubt as more people cut the cable cord. And where are those people going? 

To their phones.

To help it succeed on that platform, ESPN is developing "a smartphone-first content effort that combines personalization, journalism, video and personality,” as the internal memo announcing the change described it.

According to Chad Millman, ESPN's new vice president and editorial director for domestic digital content, the broadcaster is going in this direction because "mobile is everything. We always have to be thinking about mobile first. If we’re thinking about anything else, we’re failing the audience."

And what does it mean to do mobile first?

"You need to keep re-imagining how things look," Millman said in an article in Nieman Lab.

Among other things, this means how it looks on a phone and how long the headline is. 

"What is it (the headline) going to look like and where is it going to cut off on a mobile device," he said. 

What makes all of this challenging, he added, is that pages destined for mobile are designed on a desktop.

"There’s no magic formula to simulate what it looks like on a phone," he said. "So you’re decreasing your browser before you publish it, you’re checking it on your phone as soon as you publish it to fix something right away."

Creating for mobile also means not trying to make it look like ESPN on TV.

"We’re creating for the platform or device that we most expect people to see it on, and not thinking that we have to create something that looks like it belongs on television. 

"Can you understand the story with the sound off? How long should it be? When are people dropping out of videos? 

"All of that stuff makes us rethink how we might have produced something even two or three years ago."

One example of ESPN's mobile-first strategy is its 60-second preview of the week in the NFL. The minute-long segment is designed, produced, and edited with mobile in mind. 

"It is quick cuts, it is tightly written, and it gives you information, but it does it quickly and in a sort of whimsical way. That is something that we wouldn’t have done a year ago," he said.

How quickly things change—in  the mid-2000s, when the web began to take off as a main vehicle of communication, media and others started to move from thinking print-first to web-first. 

There was a lot of agonizing back then over the need for shorter articles, and the end of an edition or issue-based mindset (see Life and Communications Unbundled, on this blog.)  

Now here we are, about a decade later, and we're beginning to hear talk about doing everything mobile-first. Which isn’t surprising, considering the growth of mobile around the world.

Today, mobile is first for ESPN. Soon it will be that way for everyone else.