I’ve done the same exercise with University of Iowa students twice in the past week: I ask them to tell me about their media use over the past 24 hours.
I want to know how they learn about the world beyond their immediate circle of family, friends and faculty. I ask them to break it down by percentage among four delivery systems: mobile, desktop or laptop computer, broadcast and print. I write those percentages in four columns on a white board:
Let me add that up for you: The 17 students and a professor I surveyed yesterday connect with the community and world using their computers about three times as much as they do using print and broadcast combined. Only eight use broadcast media at all, and only one of those uses it more than 30 percent of the time. Twelve use print but none for more than 30 percent. Only one gets less than 60 percent of news and information about the community and world from computers and mobile devices.
And these were journalism students, probably more inclined to print and broadcast media than other students. An earlier class that was a mix of computer science and journalism students showed much stronger use of mobile communication.
Even with the lower mobile media use by this class, the direction is clear. I asked the students who said 90 percent and 30 percent of their media use was mobile what those numbers would have been two years ago: Zero.
This is why media companies need to figure out a prosperous model for digital media. It may not be my Complete Community Connection or mobile-first strategy. But the future is somewhere in those two left-hand columns above.
Steve,
This is an interesting exercise, which I may try with my mass communication students at Linfield College, and I do take your point. However, college students are probably the worst group of people to base decisions about the future of information delivery on. They live in a bubble for four years, protected from the news of the world. They are focused on their studies and their social lives, and for the most part they really don’t need to know what’s going on beyond their campus.
Think back to when you were in college. Did you pay much attention to news? I didn’t, even after I started writing for my college newspaper. I didn’t know or care much about what was happening beyond my little world. I think that is still true for most college students today. However, that doesn’t worry me because I know that they will become engaged citizens who will seek out reliable sources of news and information sometime after they graduate, just as I did.
The media use of adults aged 18-22 who are not in college or of those who graduated from college three years ago would provide a better predictor of where people in general will prefer to get information in the future.
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Actually, I read newspapers all the time when I was in college. But I have always been a news junkie and that was the best delivery system then.
Any group you do this exercise with has its limitations. College students are strapped for cash and may not use smart phones (which dramatically increase use of mobile media) as much as some other groups. I will try the exercise on other groups as I encounter them. But I disagree that college students are a bad group to try this on. I think students today have a strong interest in the world beyond the campus (one class was talking a lot about today’s Apple tablet announcement). And they know they can find reliable news and information from digital sources. To think they are going to become strong print readers is fantasy that defies the proven behavior of young adults after leaving college in recent years.
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As a recent college graduate myself (I graduated in May 2009 from UVa) I find the results completely in line with my own experience. Although I majored in English and am now seeking out a future career in journalism, I didn’t keep up with the news very well while I attended college. College students are constantly pressed for time with all of their course work and extra curricular activities. Reading a newspaper and watching the news require both time and energy. Moreover, paying for a paper wasn’t high on my priority list at the time. I did, however, read sections of the paper when the school provided copies of the New York Times for free at one of our school libraries. Unfortunately, the downturn in the economy ended that practice and I went back to being a typical, uniformed college student. I don’t think a survey of college students represents an accurate view of the community’s intake of the news. Now that I’ve graduated, I read the paper and online articles much more frequently, I occasionally watch the news on TV, and I am overall much more cognizant of current events.
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Hello Steve,
Great website. I found you through Romeneski.
Me: Journalism undergrad and J.D., U-Texas; Engineering degree from U-Houston and Masters in Physics from U-Texas-Dallas. Currently a patent attorney working with mobile technologies (wireless and handset). I have a son in the Engineering program at U-Texas (am I really that old!?!).
When I was in undergrad, all my news came from reading UPI stories over a Digital workstation while working at the Daily Texan. Rarely did I watch network news. Cable news (CNN) was in its infancy. I compare that with my son, who gets most of his news based on what has been voted to the top on Reddit. He also watches, from time to time, Colbert and Stewart. I no longer read actual print newspapers–nor does he. I will read stories linked to papers from Drudge, Romeneski. I also visit ABCNews.com, CNN.com and Fox News.
Apple iPad may be what finally tips this generation of 20 somethings and younger entirely away from paper based information sources to electronic ones…The question is how to make money from this platform…
The “walled garden” approach of the wireless carriers was once the right way to make money–because the AT&Ts, Verizon’s, T-Mobile etc. controlled access to the mobile terminal–they could charge users from content, and then turn around and pay the content providers (and they could easily track who read what). Unfortunately, reading content on small 2 inch handset screens in 1997 was painful. Then came the iPhone. The iPhone could have gone the walled garden way (with AT&T and Apple controlling content and hence charging users) or the open terminal way–more akin to the Internet experience. Of course, they went the latter.
With the “everything is free” Internet model now taking over the mobile terminal, I, like many, am even more unsure as to how a content provider makes sufficient money to pay its costs, much less make a profit. More and more people are going to be getting their news from the mobile terminal…the Newsday 35 pay subscriber debacle is not a good omen. Here are my thoughts after having worked in Journalism and in wireless technologies for 25 years:
I think “objective” content providers–e.g., newspapers, will be hurt the most–insufficient numbers of readers are willing to pay for unvarnished facts. Americans have been socialized to believe that facts themselves belong in the public domain and it is wrong for a provider to charge to have someone collect, organize and display these facts. It’s wrong–but that is the way it is…
On the other hand, activist content providers, those who take these “free facts” and intepret them through their ideological lens tend to have more passionate consumers. These consumers are willing to pay to access this content
I think newspapers must adopt (or admit) and trumpet an ideological slant (left-center, right-center, etc.) (think UK and Fleet Street). I know this would be greeted as heresy to the old guard of the newspaper business. But it is the only way to get consumers to pay for content.
As much as the MSM hates Murdoch, he is showing them the way to financial security. Papers will have to admit their bias–and use this as a marketing tool. They can still provide fact based paragraphs in their stories–but these paragraphs will just be used to set up the commentary.
Sorry for throwing a skunk into the party! Thanks for providing this forum.
Mike
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I agree entirely with discarding the “objectivity” we’ve been arguing over for 50 years. If the advertisers it was supposed to lure have wandered away (where the heck DID all the advertisers go, anyway?), why not seek subsidies from parties and interests, and be frank about where the money is coming from? I’d rather be in the Democrats’ pocket than be taking pay from the government.
Now … how do you make a transition?
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Lisa,
I would not discount to habits of college students. They may be building behaviors on media consumption that will last a life time. We are no longer see that traditional shift to print media as consumers mature.
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Doing this survey on students today, of course most of them get their information electronically. That is what print is shifting to. Getting your daily newspaper isn’t fast enough and people want instant gratification in this day and age. It’s just the shifting of time and things evolving. I just wish that in college, when majoring in journalism, that the classes taught would keep up with the times. I feel cheated not being taught multimedia journalism or how to use the internet to broadcast. Guess I’ll have to figure it out on my own.
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[…] repeated an exercise I first did in 2010 at the University of Iowa and have done several times since (I described it again in the Nieman piece). It shows pretty […]
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