Davemolloy.net

I’ve got to take the hat off to Nick Petrie over at Redbrick (the paper of Birmingham University) for doing something I wasn’t aware could easily be done: creating an iPhone app for his paper.

The app is powered by a service called MotherApp, which takes content from RSS and Twitter feeds and plugs it directly into a pre-established template. Simple, yet effective. The app splits advertising revenue 50/50 between MotherApp and the content provider, or it can be taken ad-free for an annual subscription of $99.

Now, it’s not exactly perfect. There’s only an option for a single RSS feed, so far as I can see, so there’s no way of splitting content into news/sport/features etc. But for a starting point, it seems like a great and cheap (even free) way to dip into the mobile sphere. Now, there’s obviously the problem that it requires a consistently up-to-date web service, which, sadly, is a challenge for many student papers (my own included). But, if you are running a tight online ship that’s keeping your visitors coming back for more between publication dates of your print issues, it might e something to consider.

And, of course, it’s easy to point out that this functionality could be made available via a mobile web browser.But that’s not the point- Petrie is giving his audience options, and maybe many of them will appreciate having a dedicated app for the purpose. And, short of having a programmer to hand or employing one (who knows Cocoa, Objective-C etc.), simple yet effective services like this are the only real way for the student press to do this kind of thing.

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