News Consumption in the USA

We’ve had a fair amount on discuccion on how people consume news in the digital age. A new survey conducted jointly by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Project for Excellence in Journalism  has been released showing that 92% of Americans get their daily news from multiple platforms.  

Apple iPad, Courtesy of Reuters Pictures

The survey shows that the Internet is now the third most-popular news platform.  Moving ahead of more traditional outlets such as newspapers and radio and only just behind local and national television. Six out of ten Americans now get their news from a broad combination of sources and the Internet is allowing them to personalize how they receive their news.  

Personalized: 28% of Internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.    

News is also becoming more participatory with the rising use of social networking technology to filter, assess, and react to news. A press release from the center says that people are also using;

“traditional email and other tools to swap stories and comment on them. Among those who get news online, 75% get news forwarded through email or posts on social networking sites and 52% share links to news with others via those means. ” 

Participatory: 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.  

The results of the survey  also show that mobile technologies are making news more  portable.  

Portable: 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.    

Read the full report here.  

Read the survey questions here.

Presentation Survey results are in!

I hope our presentation gave people a good overview of the challenges which Public Service Broadcasting faces in the Digital Age, as well as the scope for new opportunities.

Ross and Hayley gave an excellent overview of the BBC/ ITV debate as well as showcasing how it is not just news that comes under the remit of PSB- the quality and learning value of entertainment and soaps should not be underestimated, as they highlighted.

Stuart enacted (literally!) the debate on how advertising is likely to shape PSB output in the future. An image of Fox News presenters drinking coffee from Starbucks cups really brought home the crucial question of how this will influence future broadcasting programmes.

Ed spoke to two international journalists about the changing landscape of international news gathering and collaboration with local journalists – our spectators unfortunately ran out of their pre-paid 15 minutes to watch the full interviews but be first to see it here!

And I made it over from America as a chat show host to deliver some learnings about the changing nature of the audience in the digital age. Bringing the chat-show forum to the blog!

I have counted up and gathered people’s answers from our questionnaires and there are some interesting (although not wholly unsurprising) learnings:

Only 3 out of 28 agreed to paying for online news. This sparked a big debate where the question remains

How can you justify the work of trained and skilled journalists if they are not getting paid for it? It is a service after all. Is the key to pay for only niche and more detailed research and reports?

The largest news source by far (with everyone ticking this box) was online news, whilst only 9 people claimed to read printed journalism- again backing up the statistics from an earlier post.

People were split almost 50-50 on the question of whether the licence fee should be shared between broadcasters. Stephen Fry gives an interesting view on this in Hayley’s post on the BBC’s licence fee.

As does Jon Simpson in his book ‘News from No Man’s Land’, highly recommend it!

Finally, unsurprisingly facebook came top of the social media sites, with almost everyone using it. People listed on average three social media sites (twitter, facebook, gmail, word press, guardian online, BBC, indy media, you tube, delicious)… And these were only the main ones.

Just goes to show how the variety of platforms opening up in the digital age is the key challenge – or opportunity- for broadcasters going forward. The debate continues.