The Digitization of the News
Recent research from Pew shines light on the digitization of the news:
- consuming the news digitally now surpasses physically reading the news. In 2004, 24 percent of respondents got their news digitally while today 39 percent do the same. Fifty-five percent of respondents said they watched the news on TV yesterday which is still the highest of any form, but is down from 68 percent in 1991.
- Only a third of individuals under 29 years-old watch the news on TV – down from 49 percent in 2006.
- Today almost one-in-five get their news through social networks – up from one-in-ten just two years ago.
- As you can see below, today more than half of the readers of the New York Times do so digitally and the similar figure is high for other major newspapers.
Stats #2 and #3 above taken together paint the most interesting picture of the future. Now it is certainly true that as individuals age, their preferences towards things like broadcast news might change. But I believe the first digital decade will have a profound impact on how news is consumed in the second digital decade.
The future generation of news consumers want something different from their news. Given the rise of connected devices, individuals no longer need to sit through linear news for information like local weather and sports. News going forward will be significantly more compartmentalized. We’ve seen some of this with the rise of specialized and focused news services.
The digitization of news is also impacted by geography. News that is hyper-local is best delivered online because broadcast news by definition has to serve a broader market.
Portable devices with integrated GPS can deliver hyper-local news when it is most relevant. So the time function becomes an important component of news delivery in the second digital decade.
Finally, curation and relevancy will be an important element of news consumption. Facebook is a curated service where the individual user establishes parameters which dictate which streams of information they receive. Increasingly, individuals get to dictate which news items are most relevant to them.