[Malik Graham, Editorial Intern, Digital.NYC]
A smartphone being used to take a crowd photograph at Euro 2016. (JEAN-CHRISTOPHE MAGNENET/AFP/Getty Images)
Earlier this year I explored the state of journalism on the web, performing a detailed technical analysis of the myriad tracking beacons, advertising inserts, dynamic content and other technologies bogging down modern news websites. A key finding was that news websites rate among the worst pages on the entire web in terms of user experience. One particularly egregious news site made more than 6,500 requests and consumed more than 100MB of bandwidth just to display a single article during tests. As the web has rushed towards “mobile first,” a number of initiatives seek to help websites optimize themselves for the mobile web, perhaps most visibly Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project. How is AMP’s adoption faring across the world?
Over the last several months I’ve spoken with a wide range of web designers and publishers in the journalism community ranging from tier one international outlets to small local outlets about how they are adapting to the mobile revolution. One of the most striking trends in those conversations has been the number of outlets that have argued that responsive design is the same as mobile optimized and that by simply using responsive templates for their websites, they were already completely mobile first.
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