Mobile FT.com is a River of News

I have a pet theory, one that is not widely shared amongst my colleagues. I think that what we now know as news sites will come to resemble what we now know as blogs. I don’t mean this in the broader sense of the conversational use of blogs so much as the “newest story at the top, reverse chronological” flow of news. That’s what makes sense to me as a useful way of presenting news in the era of vertical scrolling and user-determined levels of importance.

On the whole, the people I work with treat this as a pile of old tosh, and cheerfully ignore me. But the new mobile version of FT.com, which I’ve been checking out today on my iPhone, brings my idea to mind:

The design, to me, demonstrates the value of that blog-style design in the mobile environment. What do you want to know? The latest news. Not what a gatekeeper has deemed the most important, just the newest.It’s incredibly easy to just scroll up and down the news with a flick of the thumb, or click through to anything interesting. It’s simple, but very, very effective, because it understand that speed and timeliness are the key factors for news on the go.

And it’s even got a nice icon for bookmarking it on the iPhone: