Appetite for news
In driving into the office this (Sunday) morning, I was listening to an interesting article on Radio New Zealand. It involved leading members of the media discussing the demise of newspaper and television news consumption. Part of this panel was also a guy from Scoop - New Zealand’s leading online news agency (I am sorry I joined the article late so did not hear names).
The thing that interested me was just how much these guys did not get it. The interviewer kept pushing a point that the public had lost interest in news and were therefore consuming less. There was a lot of discussion around how consumers are choosing to consume their media at different times (i.e. at work via the Internet) but absolutely no discussion about consumers are demand “pull” media, as opposed to “push”.
We have discussed this before in length in my articles explaining how consumers are choosing what they receive as news and when they receive. Instead on waiting to fed the news on TV at 6pm or in the morning paper, technologies such as RSS feeds and social book-marking websites allow consumers to choose the news articles they are interesting in (or in the case of social bookmark sites such as Digg.com and Del.icio.us what the general masses consider to be relevant) and to choose when and how they consume them. For example, I have a number of different RSS feeds for my news (everything from CNN, Sky, BBC, New York Times, and NZ Herald) and I will regularly read about the same incident from two or three of these feeds getting a different slant on the news and making my own, what I perceive to be, “real truth” conclusions.
In fact, I think this is the point that these guys were missing in this radio article: the consumers appetite for news has increased exponentially, along with consumers distrust on the impartiality of mainstream news reports. The ease of these “web 2.0″ technologies has mean’t that consumers can create their own news, receiving information on topics they are interested in, and filtering out the political or other spin on the news. In my recent article on “What is Web 2.0?” I gave two examples of a more pertinent form of journalism, known as “citizen journalism”. In the UK The Sun newspaper now provides a single mobile phone number for the public to submit copy and photos, and in South Korea the OhmyNews service has over 50 journalists editing content regularly received from 40,000 citizen journalists. A fundamental
shift in people’s perception of who has the authority to ‘say’ and ‘know’ underpins the Web 2.0 ethos.
One of the points made is the growth in consumption in these off line medias (newspapers and TV) of faux journalism - by this they mean lifestyle information etc in your Sunday papers. One commentator suggested this was because consumers were sick of the news. Quite the opposite, in our daily routine we are happy to consume much more news, rather it is because reading the lifestyle section of your Sunday paper is a form of escapism from the rigours of the week of business and work. Unfortunately, by the time Saturday or Sunday, or for that matter 6pm on a weekday when TV news is on, there is no news current enough for our appetite. There is no news that we have not already digested through our computers throughout the day. An interesting term is media snacking; taking snippets of information from a multitude of media in order to consume more information earlier and faster. these snippets might be coming from our RSS feed readers, online news sites, traditional news media, and increasingly media sharing sites such as You Tube and Flickr.
So, are newspapers and TV newspapers dead? In their current format I think so. In was interesting that the section of the article that I listened to the guys from Scoop did not speak too much rather just confirming many of the statements, such as a noticeable increase in traffic at 10am and 6:30pm. It is clear that those media outlets that recognise the insatiable appetite for fast unfiltered news will be the winner.