At conferences — and in editorial meetings, when a visionary speech from management is required — media companies like to talk about how the future of news is mobile. And some media outlets are even putting their money where their mouth is, by releasing apps like NYT Now. But for many, it’s still a struggle just to get their websites to render properly on a mobile device, and their apps are unloved orphans standing alone in a field, carrying bad reproductions of the print version.

Meanwhile, [company]Google’s[/company] information delivery features get stronger and stronger, and the amount it knows about the intended audience for that information grows larger. It’s like the web and Google News all over again, only worse.

For every innovative news app like Circa, which takes in all the news about a given event and creates brief updates that readers can “follow,” there are dozens of…