Increasingly, news will have to be produced for cell phones rather than just computer screens.
© John Prescott, iStockphoto

The social media tracking site Mashable has an interesting take on Yahoo!’s report about its most popular search terms of 2009.

Mashable sees evidence in the search terms that we are becoming more comfortable with using handheld devices to search for — and consume news, whether it is text, photos or video. This has big implications for journalists.

The obvious one is that we must push our information out for all three screens: TVs, computers and handhelds. But pushing the same old stuff to a new screen is not the solution.

Articles, photos and video must be different to work ion a small-screen format.

At Crain’s Detroit Business, where journalists are writing for Blackberry toting auto executives, they are striving to write leads that will fit on the first (little) screen of a Blackberry. The inverted pyramid is in again — though it has to be a short one. In a talk to some of my journalism students at Michigan State University, Phil Nussel, managing editor of AN Online at Automotive News, practically laughed at the sweet, 21-inch iMac monitors on my students’ desks. (Never mind that he went to the University of Michigan.) He said no one was going to be using such monstrosities soon. They’ll all be hunched over their handhelds and cell phones, texting and reading as they walk.

He makes a good point. The most valuable, hottest journalism we can serve up will probably not wait until someone gets back to their desk. They will want it now.

A friend who studied journalism at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and who grew up in a major tech company checks her iPhone dozens of times a day for updates. She does not want to have to run find a computer — even her wireless Air Mac — to find the latest news.

Text is one thing, and relatively easy to adapt, relying on old-school wire story techniques.

Video is something different.

As the use of mobile devices rises and converges with rising downloads of videos, news footage will have to be shot in different ways to work well on our smallest screens. (Remember when TV’s used to be called small screens, vs. the big screens in movie theaters?)

The technology for squeezing video files through to mobile devices is being handled and makes cell phone videos possible, but news video for handhelds will have to be produced differently, too.

To stand out, be the first journalist on your block who masters he composition and editing of news videos made to be seen on the run.

Earlier this year, National Public Radio’s Neda Ulaby interviewed music video directors Shane Drake and Joseph Kahn about how they produce videos for handhelds. Kahn told Ulaby,” I can almost look at every video, and it’s pretty much a center-framed video. And the reason why is because you see the whole image all at the same time. Like, the whole image is completely seen at first glance on a tiny little rectangle or a tiny little square.”

The NPR transcript, audio and small-screen music videos are here.

Here is one of the videos they talked about, Panic at the Disco’s “I Write Sins Not Tragedies,” by Drake. Several elements are clearly not journalistic — the makeup, fire-eating, stilt-walking and music — but pay attention to the fast-paced editing and frequent closeups.

Immediacy and news value will still matter, of course. News videos that have gone viral have done it for those reasons and not for their production value. But if journalists are to create videos for audiences that increasingly sees them on two-inch screens, we’re going to have to compose them with that in mind.

Read Mashable’s report about popular Yahoo! search terms and the move to mobile phones here.