Who Uses The News, And How?

by nic | November 13, 2009 | Conference | 2 Comments

The Conference’s first panel aims to discuss the demand for news, who its audience is, what they’re looking for, and how the new and vast range of choices is affecting the consumption of traditional news.  On the panel are Tom Rosenstiel (Director, Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism), Jay Rosen (New York University), Lee Rainie (Director, Pew Internet & American Life Project), and Steve Dennen (Vice President, comScore).

Lee Rainie opened the panel with a statistical survey of the landscape: in 2000, 46% of adults used the internet, only 5% with broadband at home; 50% owned a cellphone, and no-one connected to the internet wirelessly. By 2009, those numbers were up to 79% online, 63% with home broadband, 85% using cellphones, and 56% with wireless internet.

For Rainie, there are twelve ways that the audience for news has changed over the last decade: 1. the audience is shrinking; 2. it spends less time consuming news; 3. it’s losing faith in news; 4. people are changing platforms (traditional news sources down by as much as half, online news up 1,850%!); the internet has overtaken newspapers as the primary source of national and international news; 5. segmenting by demographic; 6. news-grazing: news is no longer an evening appointment, but an all-day affair; 7. it’s becoming mobile: 29% are getting news on their phones; 8. it’s customizing, through iGoogle, RSS feeds, news alerts, etc.; 9. it’s polarizing along ideological lines; 10. platforms are blending; 11. it’s becoming participatory; 12. it’s becoming social: the audience shares news through email, Facebook profiles.

[See the slides here.]

Steve Dennen painted a similar picture from within the industry: news audiences are skewing older (and higher income), and growth is slowing; internet use is up 10% y/y and grazing users are spending less time on each site; top 10 sites account for 43% of time spent online and 37% of pages consumed; there’s been a 14% y/y decline in the online “market share” of the news-and-information category.  On the good news side, the online-only-newspaper sector has grown 35%; but total news consumption (both traditional and online) is down 13%!  Dennen discussed the significance of search engines: 62% of search click-throughs come from Google. A top US newspaper site gets 32% of its traffic from search enginges, e-mail sites, Facebook and Yahoo!. Twitter’s has seen a 1,703% y/y growth in unique visits!

Are online companies managing to convert traffic into revenue?  Dennen mentioned that sampled news sites are making about $130 per thousand unique visitors; put another way, if they moved to a $1-a-month pay model and lost 80% of their audience, they would still make more money.

Jay Rosen structured his presentation around the problems he has with the conference’s title.  If all you want to know is who will pay, Rosen claims one answer is: rich people will always pay for exclusive news.  What we really care about is not that someone pays someone else for news; our concern is about sustaining news of public importance (the surveillance of power, accountability journalism), and ensuring that it reaches the public.  Rosen discussed how the internet’s successes are subsidizing their businesses: by running virtual focus groups, appearing at conferences, advising companies—not online revenue.  Rosen has another complaint: maybe the messengers aren’t adding enough value to be paid (over 30 reporters covering the World Series?).  And: if we’re going to consider subsidies, how do we make journalists accountable to the taxpayers?  Rosen’s parting mystery: while confidence in journalism is dropping, journalists have become better trained than ever.

Tom Rosenstiel suggested that the notion that journalism is dying doesn’t fully capture the reality: one aspect of media—participation—is more robust than ever.  In print, the problem is revenue, not audience.  About two-thirds of all classified advertising revenue from a decade ago is now gone; it may vanish entirely in four or five years.  In television, the advertising mechanism still works, but the audience is disappearing.  The net result is that newsrooms are shrinking: the LA Times is down by half, as the Washington Post soon will be.  So, understandably, newsrooms are changing what they do: they’re increasingly niched (‘do what you do best, borrow the rest’) and more focused on pushing their content into the stream.

This ‘unbundling of the news’ is, says Rosenstiel, a huge threat to media’s civic function.  We’re becoming our own aggregators, but very few of us are commenting, posting, blogging.  Rosenstiel and Rosen agree: specialized consumers are going to get their news (via Bloomberg, for instance).  But what will happen to the rest?  Will the values of traditional media transfer to the new, unbundled ecology?  Will a wiki culture provide sufficiently accurate news?  Do we need professional journalists?  We’ve traditionally relied on an elite group—journalists—to make sense of all of the facts, to show up at meetings, to tell us what matters; how, or by whom, will this be managed in the future?

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