One of the most compelling sessions at the recent World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) Asian Leaders Summit in Singapore came from Dr. Mario Garcia, the Cuban-American design titan whose fingerprints are on some of the world’s most influential newsrooms.

As CEO of Garcia Media, he has shaped the visual language of titles like The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, South China Morning Post, and The Straits Times—and continues to guide the next generation as a senior adviser at Columbia Journalism School.

Dr. Garcia spoke on a topic that many traditional newsrooms still struggle to fully grasp: mobile storytelling. In an era when the phone has become our primary news gateway, it’s no longer enough to simply shrink print layouts onto a smaller screen. Consumption habits have fundamentally changed, and our storytelling must evolve with them.

But what exactly is mobile storytelling? The smartphone is a visual-first platform, where images and motion guide the reader through a linear, scroll-driven narrative.

Mobile storytelling, as defined by journalism.co.uk, is “a matter of working with text and images as integrated elements. Contrary to the traditional story format for print, images are not just illustrations. They are vital elements which shape and progress the story flow.”

For newsrooms, it is a shift that challenges long-held assumptions. For decades, print led with text and treated visuals as support; mobile flips that hierarchy.

With audiences mostly on their phones day in and day out, content production must embrace formats built for that behavior. This means stories designed for vertical consumption, anchored by multimedia, interaction, and even rich media templates that invite the reader to participate, not just observe.

The challenge, of course, is that this demands a different kind of newsroom culture that values motion, audio, sequencing, and design thinking as much as reporting.

“This requires a totally different and new set of skills,” Dr. Garcia says. “Journalists need to become visual thinkers who conceptualize stories that appeal to more than just the brain and the eye. Today’s journalists learn from cinematographers, and learn to use audio and video as key components in the storytelling process.”

Here’s the challenge: News organizations that fail to adapt to mobile storytelling risk losing not just relevance, but entire generations of readers.

The future of news is not just digital; it is experiential, immersive, and definitively mobile. The sooner we acknowledge this, the sooner we can craft journalism that meets audiences where they already are: in the palm of their hand.

(Rey Robes Ilagan is the editor of Manila Bulletin’s Lifestyle section.)