Ofcom today (4 August) released its TV, radio, broadband, telecoms and mobile industries report, noting significant changes over the “digital decade” since 2001.

Here is the 341 page Communications Market Report boiled down to a list of 30 facts and figures that are relevant to publishers.

Smartphones

1. More than a quarter of adults (27 per cent) own a smartphone;

2. Almost half of teenagers (47 per cent) own a smartphone;

3. Nine out of 10 people (91 per cent) own a mobile phone;

4. Three in 10 mobile phones are smartphones;

5. Most people with smartphones (59 per cent) acquired their device in the past year.

Internet use

6. More than a quarter of people use their mobile phones for internet access. In the first quarter (Q1) of 2011, 28 per cent of UK adults claimed to do so;

7. Those aged 16-24 are more than 10 times more likely to go online via a mobile than those aged 55+;

8. More than three quarters (76 per cent) of homes are now connected to the internet;

9. For the first time household internet take-up (78 per cent) exceeded computer ownership (77 per cent) as a small proportion of households went online using mobile phones only;

10. More than two-thirds (67 per cent) of households have a fixed broadband connection and 17 per cent have a mobile broadband (dongle) connection. In Q1 2011, 26 per cent of over-75s had home internet access, as did 55 per cent of 64-74 year-olds;

11. Consumers use a wide range of devices to access the internet at home. In 2010, 69 per cent said they accessed the internet at home via a laptop or PC, 31 per cent via a mobile phone;

12. Wifi routers were used by 75 per cent of broadband using households in Q1 2011;

13. More than half of all UK households are passed by super-fast broadband;

14. Google has more than three times the user base of any other search engine;

15. The leading blogging site is Google’s Blogger, which reached 8.2 million users in April 2011.

Facebook and other social networking

16. Social networking accounts for more than a fifth of all time spent on the internet;

17. People spend more than five times as much time on Facebook than on any other site;

18. More than 90 per cent of social networking time is spent on Facebook;

19. The most popular claimed use of the internet on mobile phones was social networking services (used by 57 per cent of mobile phone internet users);

20. Mobile users of Facebook spent an average of 5.6 hours on the site in December 2010 (11 minutes a day);

21. In Q1 2011, 46 per cent of UK adults claimed to use social networking services on a home internet connection. There are signs that the growth of social networking may be reaching saturation point: total time spent on social networking sites was just 1.3 per cent higher in April 2011 than in April 2010.

Smartphone brands

22. The Apple iPhone is the most popular brand of smartphone, but BlackBerry handsets are a favourite choice among younger consumers;

23. Apple’s iPhone has a 32 per cent share among adults. This is the brand of choice among ABC1s (37 per cent) and is even higher among ABs alone (44 per cent). But BlackBerry handsets have also taken a significant share of the market (24 per cent) and are particularly popular among younger adults and teens (37 per cent each).

Advertising and commercial

24. More than a quarter of all UK advertising spend is on the internet. Advertising spend on the internet grew by 16 per cent in 2010, to more than £4 billion, accounting for 26 per cent of total advertising spend in the UK, marginally ahead of television;

25. Mobile advertising increased by 121 per cent in 2010 to reach £83 million;

26. In 2010, the mobile advertising market was only 2 per cent the size of the internet ad market. However, driven by increasing use of internet services on mobile phones, together with more sophisticated business models (for example, fully or partially advertising-funded mobile applications), mobile advertising revenue more than doubled during 2010. Search-based advertising increased by the greatest amount (172 per cent) and increased its share of mobile advertising from 54 per cent to 66 per cent;

27. Nearly three-quarters of internet users shop online. Visitors to coupon and reward sites increased by 25 per cent in the year to April 2011, when nearly 40 per cent of internet users visited at least one such site.

Apps

28. Just under half (47 per cent) of adult smartphone users have ever downloaded an app, with one in five (20 per cent) doing so regularly;

29. Regular apps downloaders are skewed male and age 25-34. Just over half (54 per cent) of apps downloaders have paid for an app – with their mean average maximum spend on a single app being £3 – £3.99;

30. Apps downloading is higher among teens than adults; around two-thirds (63 per cent) of teen smartphone users have ever downloaded an app, with one in four (28 per cent) doing so regularly. Six in ten (60 per cent) have paid for an app. The average maximum amount of spend among teens is £3.70 and the median is £3 – £3.99.

See a further 10 facts on mobile media.

All graphs taken from the Ofcom report.

• Eight lessons for publishers from comScore’s new report on mobile
• Online advertising spend tops £4bn after 12.8% rise
• Is Facebook falling out of favour?
• Flurry: Mobile app use overtakes web browsing in US
• UK ad spend dropped 4% in 2008, says AdAssoc

A report carried out every two years by the Pew Research Center suggests Americans are spending more time consuming news now than 10 years ago.

The research, released this week, found that rather than replacing traditional media with digital platforms, consumers spend an additional 13 minutes daily getting news online as well as 57 minutes on average getting news from traditional media such as television, radio and newspapers. In the year 2000 the survey reported a total of 59 minutes was spent by audiences consuming news, with no time reportedly spent consuming news online by respondents until 2004.

According to the report, this is one of the highest totals measured since the mid-1990s, which does not take into account time spent getting news from mobile phones or other digital devices. Only eight per cent of respondents get their news from their mobile.

The news consumption survey recorded the responses from more than 3000 adults from 8 to 28 of June. Other findings include an increase in ‘news-grazers’ who consume the news on a less regular basis from 40 per cent in 2006 to 57 per cent in 2010. The survey also found an increase in the use of search engines for news gathering, rising to 33 per cent from 19 per cent in 2008.

See the report in full here..

• Online news as trustworthy as print for majority of readers, survey claims
• Flurry: Mobile app use overtakes web browsing in US
• Media Release: Journalists rate social media as a professional tool
• Poynter: Danish newspapers not ‘trustworthy, relevant, or necessary’
• International survey of newspapers’ business strategy calls for executives

According to this video presentation by Jesse Thomas, eighty-one percent of email is spam. But if you view the rest of the statistics, you can see how email is becoming rapidly irrelevant as a key communications – and publishing – tool.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo. Hat tip: @adders

• Tool of the week for journalists: Thinglink, for interactive images
• Obama’s digital guru (aka Thomas Gensemer) at City: “Email is still the killer app”
• Online news on the rise in Italy
• The New York Review of Books: ‘The practice of journalism, far from being leeched by the web, is being reinvented there’
• Slideshare: Steve Buttry’s ‘Twitter for journalists’ presentation

This week’s Job of the Week on Journalism.co.uk is Travelzoo (Europe) Ltd’s vacancy for an assistant producer.

Closing date: 08/11/09
Salary: Up to £26K
Location: London, Covent Garden
Hours Per Week: 40

Travelzoo (Europe) Ltd is the European subsidiary of Travelzoo Inc. (NASDAQ: TZOO), a global Internet company. With more than 17 million subscribers in Asia Pacific, Europe and North America, Travelzoo® publishes offers from more than 1,000 advertisers. Travelzoo’s deal experts review offers to find the best travel deals and confirm their true value.

2.4 million travel enthusiasts visit our European websites each month, and in November 2008, Travelzoo.co.uk was voted the third best travel website by readers of The Daily and Sunday Telegraph.

The assistant producer will be part of the production team and have following responsibilities:
* Research, develop and source outstanding travel deals
* Writing news-focused, compelling travel deal content explaining the details for each outstanding deal
* Assisting in the management of client campaigns, including monitoring campaign performance, providing campaign reports, negotiating offers
* Developing and fostering client relationships
* Working with colleagues from offices in Paris, Munich, Hamburg and Barcelona

Candidate profile:
* First professional experience as editorial assistant or online content manager or online marketing assistant, ideally acquired in an online media company or in a similar fast paced work environment
* Excellent written and verbal communication skills
* Strong project management, problem solving and organizational skills
* Ability to multi-tasking, working with deadlines
* Passion for travel, knowledge about travel media content would be a plus
* Proactive and self-starter attitude
* Bachelor’s degree minimum
* Knowledge of other languages (French, German, Spanish) would be a plus

What we offer:
* Competitive salary
* Excellent global career opportunities in a high growth company
* Ask about our travel perk!

For more information and to apply, please visit the vacancy listing at http://www.journalism.co.uk/75/articles/535731.php

• This week’s new jobs from Journalism.co.uk
• Twenty-one new media, editorial, PR and communications vacancies this week on Journalism.co.uk
• Twenty-seven new media, editorial, communications and PR jobs this week on Journalism.co.uk
• Thirty-four editorial, new media, communications and PR jobs this week on Journalism.co.uk
• Twenty new media, editorial, PR and communications vacancies this week on Journalism.co.uk

The search engine giant will today make the case that regional newspaper publishers should be allowed to merger, because of the impact of Google and other internet companies, in its submission to the Office of Fair Trading’s review of the existing newspaper merger structure.

Full article at this link…

• Media Release: Office of Fair Trading seeks input on local media mergers
• Sky News: Trinity Mirror approached Mecom for merger
• Belgian newspapers seeking £39m damages from Google
• DNA09: Aggregators – friend or foe? Unfair competition, says Copiepresse
• Times: BBC to offer rivals help developing news programmes

Stuff.co.nz reports that the Australian government’s plan to censor the internet is ‘in tatters’: Australia’s largest internet provider is saying it will not participate in live trials of the system.

• NYTimes.com: Chinese government defends decision to re-block websites
• Australian editor-in-chief’s lawsuit against journalism lecturer stirs debate
• Police attack The Australian newspaper over terror raids scoop
• AFP: Australia’s Fairfax Media to shed 550 jobs
• ProPublica-inspired global news site launches in Australia

In Marc Andreessen’s world the Christian Science Monitor wouldn’t be the only traditional print product going online-only.

In this interview in the latest edition of Portfolio, Andreessen, who is co-founder of Ning, Netscape and investor in Digg and Twitter, says the New York Times should cut its print losses and focus on ‘the market of the future’.

If you were running the New York Times, what would you do?
[Andreessen] Shut off the print edition right now. You’ve got to play offence. You’ve got to do what Intel did in ’85 when it was getting killed by the Japanese in memory chips, which was its dominant business. And it famously killed the business – shut it off and focused on its much smaller business, microprocessors, because that was going to be the market of the future. And the minute Intel got out of playing defence and into playing offence, its future was secure. The newspaper companies have to do exactly the same thing.

The financial markets have discounted forward to the terminal conclusion for newspapers, which is basically bankruptcy. So at this point, if you’re one of these major newspapers and you shut off the printing press, your stock price would probably go up, despite the fact that you would lose 90 per cent of your revenue. Then you play offence. And guess what? You’re an internet company.

• Memeburn: Could Intel’s tech news site start a corporate media trend?
• Daily Intel: New York Times to bring back pay wall?
• Daily Intel: Lessons for other publishers from the Times paywall
• Wired: New York print war is really about digital future
• Forbes.com: IHT.com will become part of the New York Times site

Lee Han-ki, editor-in-chief of South Korea’s citizen journalism news organisation Oh My News, has said the proposed legislation to clampdown on online news in the country could stunt the ‘democratic development’ of the Korean press.

In an interview with the Guardian, Han-ki said the proposals are aimed at controlling public opinion of news media and repressing free speech.

Under the legislation proposed by newly-elected government leader Lee Myung-bak:

• Internet companies would have to make their search algorithms public
• Internet companies publishing news would be subject to the same regulation as media organisations
• Forum users would have to register under their real names
• The government would have the power to suspend publishing of articles found to be ‘fraudulent or slanderous’ for at least 30 days

• allmediascotland: Scottish government drops plans to remove public notices from newspapers
• PDA: ‘Algorithms will replace journalists’
• Editors Weblog: French government considering ‘Google tax’
• MediaWeek: Trade group discusses quality guidelines for syndicated content
• paidContent: Government ends plans for free online content at main libraries

Following the review of bbc.co.uk in which the BBC Trust criticised the lack of internal navigation on the site, the Beeb has launched a beta aggregation service.

BBC Topics, which will have automatically updated pages, will cover people, countries or subjects.

“So topics uses a variety of search techniques to create feeds of the latest BBC content from news articles, programmes available to watch on iPlayer, weather forecasts, news videos, country profiles and information from the TV and radio schedules. BBC editors then add in hand-picked articles and features from around the BBC and other websites,” said Matthew McDonnell, portfolio executive, search and navigation, internet group, BBC Future Media and Technology, on the BBC Internet Blog.

The pages will present everything the BBC has on a certain topic, whether it is in or out of the news, McDonnell added.

Topics covered will be partly chosen in relation to the site’s search logs, as well as by what content is available.

Feeds to the pages from external sources are also in development, according to the blog post, which will please the Trust, who said the site should also be acting as a guide for users to outside content.

Only a few topics are being trialled so far, including China, David Cameron, NATO and dogs, but more will be added in the coming months, as will more forms of BBC content.

• Reporters to get author pages with Google’s new authorship markup
• TechCrunch: Google Realtime Search adds Facebook
• Editors’ Weblog: Details of Associated Press search landing pages
• South Africa’s Mail & Guardian newspaper unveils new all singing, all dancing website
• BBC Trust: bbc.co.uk internal search and external linking need ‘major improvements’

Caroline Little, the CEO of WashingtonPost Newsweek Interactive, has resigned from her post, the newspaper’s publisher has confirmed.

Rumours about here departure bound round the internet last week, till Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth confirmed the move in a memo to staff.

The memo praised Little’s 11 years at the company, but also suggested that the Post newspaper and web teams would move closer together as senior figures in the web team would now report directly to Weymouth.

“I am taking this opportunity to move washingtonpost.com and The Washington Post closer to a true Washington Post Media organisation – rather than a newspaper company and an Internet company,’ the publisher wrote in the memo.

‘To that end, Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com and Rob Curley, vice president of products, will report to me.

‘Goli Sheikholeslami, vice president of classifieds and local products, will report to Steve Hills, president and general manager of Washington Post Media.’

• WaPo: Facebook hires former White House press secretary
• Manager of Washington startup TBD.com leaves amid ‘stylistic differences’
• Editor & Publisher: Washington Post to start crowdsourcing
• The Washington Post and the cancelled lobbyist event
• US newspaper publisher Gannett conducting ‘small-scale’ paywall tests