August 01, 2006
The latest Pew study on news usage is out (David Newberger does a great job picking the good bits) but this is what struck me:
The consumption use of news across media is fairly constant. Use of newspapers is shrinking. Says Pews: “…even the highest estimate of daily newspaper readership — 43% for both print and online readers – is still well below the number reading a print newspaper on a typical day 10 years ago (50%).” That leads some to believe that interest in news is thus decreasing, but Pew says that’s not the case:
The rise of the internet has also not increased the overall news consumption of the American public. The percentage of Americans who skip the news entirely on a typical day has not declined since the 1990s. Nor are Americans spending any more time with the news than they did a decade ago when their news choices were much more limited. In 1996, people on average spent slightly more than an hour (66 minutes) getting the news from TV, radio or newspapers. Currently, they spend virtually the same amount of time (67 minutes) getting the news from all major news sources, the internet included. hat much of a chunk of life. People want that much news and they then allocate how to get their news across more choices and more means to get the news that is relevant to them. Some might say this is evidence of attention scarcity but I think it’s more like interest scarcity: News is only so worthwhile. An hour a day for news is a quite sane proportion — large, I think — but it is limited.
: Oh, and tell this to Jack Shafer:
But one constant remains: Local and community news continues to be the biggest draw for newspapers. And as was the case during the mid-1980s, roughly nine-in-ten of those who at least sometimes read a newspaper say they spend a significant amount of time getting the news about their city, town or region. Pew:
People who say they logged on for news yesterday spent 32 minutes, on average, getting the news online. That is significantly less than the average number of minutes that newspaper readers, radio news listeners, and TV news viewers spend with those sources. And while nearly half of all Americans (48%) spend at least 30 minutes getting news on television, just 9% spend that long getting news online.
I think that’s a bit of a red herring. The use of each medium is different: one passive and time-based, another directed and involved. Even so, it’s clear that the internet is not taking over news. It is remixing news time. Says Pew:
The web serves mostly as a supplement to other sources rather than a primary source of news. Those who use the web for news still spend more time getting news from other sources than they do getting news online. In addition, web news consumers emphasize speed and convenience over detail. Of the 23% who got news on the internet yesterday, only a minority visited newspaper websites. Instead, websites that include quick updates of major headlines, such as MSNBC, Yahoo, and CNN, dominate the web-news landscape. y add this:
To some degree, news consumers are drawn to the internet for the very reason that it does
not take much time to get news online. Most users say what distinguishes web news is its format and accessibility the ease of navigation, speed with which information can be gathered, and convenience “at my fingertips.”
I wonder whether there is a way to get another measure of news: how many stories, how many topics, hoe much information, rather than just how much time. In other words: If you spend 30 minutes watching TV news, you get a handful of stories. If you spend 30 minutes online, you could get dozens of stories or you could spend a long time on one. Time is not the best measure. I want to know about the number of news nuggets mined.
Much more to dig into in the Pew survey….
: LATER: Nicholas Carr writes about the survey, too. He tries, as usual, to turn this into a confrontation, though I don’t think it is; it’s all a matter of degree and time but the trends are the trends.
(By the way, Carr never passes up an opportunity to snipe at me as his resident philistine, which is fine, and I’ve parried back. But I’ll also note that when we met at an Annenberg event, he didn’t have the guts to say any of that, face-to-face. I sought him and and joked that we were matter meeting antimatter. He did not discuss his apparent efforts to feud. But then he got back online and immediately brought out the rifle again. It’s odd to define oneself by what one is not but if you do that, I suppose you need to find or manufacture an opposite number. This is all beside the point. And that’s my point.)
Originally posted by Jeff Jarvis from BuzzMachine, remediated by yatta on Aug 1, 2006 at 01:46 PM
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unmediated.av:
The Weekly Show
drawing from extrastruggle.
We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated? In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!". What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states, "I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\" Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden. Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow. So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;) michael
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