CellSigns awarded 2008 NAA Innovative Operations award for on-demand Mobile Alert System with the Palm Beach Post newspaper

April 8, 2008

PHILADELPHIA, April 8, 2008 – At The Palm Beach Post in West Palm Beach, Fla., taking a good idea and making it even better is a strategy for success. Since 2004, the Post has built on previous award-winning online products to create even more innovative digital media systems.

This year was no exception. The Post adapted a classified advertising technology, Classifieds on the Go, that it developed with mobile vendor CellSigns (www.cellsigns.com) and created an on-demand mobile alert system to notify users about hurricane and tropical storm activity in the Atlantic Ocean during hurricane season from June through November.

“One of the responsibilities of newspapers is to help protect people and their property,” says Dan Shorter, former general manager of PalmBeachPost.com. In January, Shorter was named president of digital media at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis.

Classifieds on the Go, which won a 2007 Innovative Operations Award, allows readers to access classified ads on demand by typing a text message code in their cell phones (“Good Ideas,” April 2007, p. 52). Last year wasn’t the first time the Post was recognized for its mobile technology. The newspaper earned recognition as a NAA Best Practices Award winner in 2004, 2005 and 2006.

The Post brainstormed other practical uses for the Classifieds on the Go technology, says Gina C. Wilcox, digital operations director. The Post also wanted to build a system that advertisers could sponsor, which led Shorter and his award-winning team to the mobile alerts.

The Post development team realized that many residents rely on their cell phones to communicate and find information during storms so, in May 2007, it began working on the alert system.

Technical Manager Dale Swain wrote a PHP automated script for the newspaper’s server that monitors the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (www.noaa.gov) every five minutes for updates about hurricanes near South Florida. The script pulls key information, such as the hurricane’s wind speed, category, direction and speed of movement, and translates it into XML before sending it to CellSigns.

The files are then dropped into CellSigns’ database, and the hurricane data are placed into fields. When mobile device users dial the word STORM to the Post’s mobile short code, they receive a text message about the hurricane’s progression. Mobile users also can view the newspaper’s STORM WAP site, which contains breaking news, live radar images and more. Users can access the alert system and the WAP site even if they don’t subscribe to the newspaper.

As an added precaution against failure during hurricanes, CellSigns placed the alert system on corporate servers outside Florida.

The final product took about three months to develop, Wilcox says, and a few weeks later, the newspaper sold a sizable sponsorship package to Publix Super Markets Inc. As part of the package, Publix could include its brand as well as a link to its Web site with alert text messages, says Wilcox. The package also includes promotions in other STORM services such as subscriber-based mobile alerts, the newspaper’s weekly HTML newsletter containing preparedness tips and advisory e-mails that are automatically generated every time the National Hurricane Center issues an update on active tropical activity.

The on-demand alert system can be easily adapted by other newspapers, whether they are in the Midwest and want to alert residents about tornadoes, or are on the West Coast and want to send updates about earthquakes, says Bill Bolger, vice president of production at The Indianapolis Star and a member of NAA’s Printing Technology Committee, which helped to judge the I.O. Awards.

“It probably didn’t hurt that we had tornadoes around here about two weeks before I reviewed the entries,” Bolger says. “I looked at this and thought, ‘We could use something like that here.’ ”