Four unrelated announcements Wednesday should give traditional news organizations, especially newspaper publishers, pause. Real estate listing and search provider Zillow.com added an Android app to its mobile lineup, joining an already popular iPhone app; Aol Autos released a new-car buying guide for the iPhone; Local business listing site Yelp.com announced it had added 1 million user-submitted business reviews in the last quarter; and Yahoo.com purchased the social-media and mobile-platform friendly Citizen Sports. And, a fifth as a bonus, location-based social network Foursquare announced it had added 100,000 users in less then two weeks.
Aside from the obvious (none are traditional media companies and their mobile apps are free) each one also carves out a niche that had at one time been the province of daily newspapers. In short, the disadvantage local media organizations face on the desktop Web is quickly being migrated to the mobile Web as well.
While the debate, and hope, continues over the role of the iPad and other tablets to “save journalism,” those discussions continue to focus largely on editorial content. Meanwhile, many other content categories, as evidenced above by a day’s worth of announcements, are already almost out of reach for traditional media companies.
