Building a mobile news engine

Crisp Wireless takes aim at newspapers and TV stations.

News alerts have been part of the mobile data formula from day 1, when the first mobile portals offered text updates of breaking news and sports — long before the first photo ever appeared on a phone. The presentation may have vastly improved to the present day, but the fundamental concept hasn't changed.

One company, though, has managed to carve itself a niche in the news delivery space, focusing not just on the big media brands but on the small newspapers that are taking their first shot at the mobile world.

Crisp Wireless has built a news aggregation, delivery and advertising platform that counts dozens of newspapers and TV stations among its customers. Ranging from the Chicago Tribune and the Detroit Free Press to USA Today and The Washington Post, customers on Crisp's mLogic platform can serve up daily news feeds, send text news alerts, search story archives, offer video and audio clips as well as photo galleries, and even link into their own Doppler radar systems. Deliver Crisp a news feed and a newspaper logo, “and you can become mobile,” said Boris Fridman, CEO of Crisp.

While mLogic is the same content platform Crisp uses to power sites such as those of Esquire or Newsweek, it has optimized the engine specifically for the unique requirements of a daily newspaper, Fridman said. Powerful, if generic, tools address all that daily news organizations have in common, including the ability to deliver breaking news moments after it's posted, update commuters on traffic or handle the massive story load that flows through a Web site.

In addition, they all have the added task of delivering both local and national advertising. (Classifieds and the weekend automotive section are, after all, the purview of the daily paper.) But the infrastructure to support an industry where the front page presented to customers can change by the minute can be costly to develop, Fridman said.

“Most newspapers or TV stations cannot afford to spend a lot of money on a mobile presence,” Fridman said. “They don't have the resources of Time magazine.”

For one of Crisp's larger customers, the Tribune Co., the mobile Web is in its nascent stages. The organization wants a mobile Web presence, but it is not ready to devote the same extent of resources to it as it does its Internet portal, said Andrew Thackray, manager of strategic marketing and mobile for Tribune Interactive.

Today the company uses the Crisp platform to aggregate the massive amount of content that its flagship paper, the Chicago Tribune, produces every day in print and on its Web site into mobile alerts and wireless application protocol pages. But as the mobile Internet gains steam, Thackray expects the Tribune to move to a more hands-on approach, hiring a producer dedicated to the mobile Web.

Those plans involve much more than just a guy picking headlines for the home page. Thackray said he is investigating features such as geo-coding stories for specific neighborhoods to create hyper-local news delivery to the phone. Whether Crisp's platform fits into the new Tribune model remains to be seen, but Thackray said Crisp appears to be evolving mLogic as the needs of its newspaper customers become more sophisticated.

“Right now we have more generic needs, which Crisp provides for easily,” he said. “But Crisp is ahead of other platforms we've seen. For instance, rather than us just feeding them XML feeds, Crisp is opening up their system so we can go produce our site ourselves.”