Tag Archives: News consumption

Ofcom report: TV main source ‘of most types of news’ except celebrity news and gossip

By Brylle on Arte & Fotographia. Some rights reserved.

Consumer research by Ofcom released in a study on Thursday reports that TV is the main source of news across all the countries analysed in the research, except for celebrity news and gossip for which the internet came top.

The research was based on an online survey of at least 1000 respondents from each country included (UK, France, Germany, Italy, USA, Japan, Australia and Spain) who were asked about “which platform they used as their main source for different types of news: national, international, sports, and celebrity news”. Answers included TV, online, radio, newspapers, magazines and “from other people”.

The study reports that “online consumers in the UK are less likely to use the internet as a main source of national news than those in Italy and Spain”, and across all countries included in the report television “is the main source of most types of news”, apart from celebrity news and gossip which was more likely to be sourced from the internet.

Although the most-cited main sources of news for online users generally are TV and the internet, across the countries in the sample there are subtle differences in consumption patterns.

When asked about their main source for national news, the platform named most often was TV, followed by the internet. In the UK, almost half (48 per cent) selected TV as their main source of national news. Respondents in France were more likely to state that they used TV as their main source of national news, where almost six in ten (58 per cent) selected TV as their main source and 26 per cent selected the internet.

A similar picture emerges in Australia, where 53 per cent mainly access national news on TV and 31 per cent via the internet. This contrasts with Italy where the internet is more likely to be used as a main source of national news, with 48 per cent of respondents using this platform, compared to 40 per cent naming TV.

Heatmap measures significance of Europe’s newspapers

Professor of cross media content at the School of Journalism and Communication at Hogeschool Utrecht, Dr Piet Bakker, has produced an interesting heatmap to illustrate the ‘significance’ of European newspapers.

Following the predictions of futurist Ross Dawson last week that newspapers in the UK will be “extinct” in their current form by 2019, Bakker writes on his Newspaper Innovation blog that rather than measuring the insignificance of newspapers over time he wanted to do the opposite, using circulation and population data.

His results, based on the number of newspapers per 100 inhabitants, places Luxembourg at the top overall, while Norway leads when it comes to paid newspapers only.

The only consistent data we have for almost every country in the world are total circulation and population. If we define newspaper significance as the number of copies per 100 (15+) inhabitants, we can compare countries, see how this changes over years and predict how it will develop.

The graph below (made with Google Docs and the heat-map gadget) show this “significance”, the darker the color, the more significant newspaper are.

Hatip: paidContent

Americans spending more time consuming news, research suggests

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..