Alan Mutter’s Reflections of a Newsosaur blog led me today to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2013: Tracking the Future of News. Core questions were asked in France, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Japan, Brazil, and the U.S., as well as the UK, to a nationally representative audience to provide an international comparison.
Here are some interesting notes:
1. Here comes mobile. Tablet usage has doubled in the 10 months since the last survey. In many countries, smartphone users are now in the majority, and most of them use these devices to access news every week. Across all the countries surveyed, 46% use a smartphone and 31% say they used the device for news at least once in the past week. (See the next Mobile Essentials webinar Oct. 24.)
2. Get to know your audience better. “In all countries we asked if people agreed that they preferred to get news from sites they know and trust. The figures were universally high, with 90% supporting the proposition in Brazil, 82% in the US, and 77% in the UK.”
3. Twitter, etc. may be as important as SEO. Social media is now rated more important than search among the ‘under 45s’. In the U.S. 47% of under 45s use social media to find news. (How’s your social media involvement?) In the U.K. it’s only 27%. (Hear a social media case study at the Las Vegas Marketing Conference.)
4. Encourage your audience to share. In the UK 18% had shared a news story in the last week by email or social network but among those actively interested in news the figures are much higher. Almost a third of those with a high interest in news share a news link at least once a week.
5. Publishing information daily (and maybe at various times of day) makes sense. Only older people are staying on any schedule for accessing news. Younger people tend to access news at all times, and “even the 35–44s seem to be losing the commitment for appointment-to-view news bulletins in the early and late evening.”
6. Americans like local. We have the highest interest of any country in news about our city or town (59%). (More women indicated that as an interest than men.) We are near the lowest to be interested in news about technology or science (26%). Wonder if that has anything to do with our students’ test scores in those areas.
7. Find tablet users. While smartphone users say the convenience not the experience draws them, tablet users like the experience more than PCs. Tablet users are also more likely to pay for news than smartphone users.
8. Americans consume video and audio. Are you using any? Only Brazil was higher (64%) for consuming news through video and audio than Americans (55%). (See a hands-on video session in Las Vegas.)
9. Check your analytics. People in the UK find news more by trusted brands, where in the U.S. people use more social and search. In both countries, the number of people who use search does not vary much by age. Of course, social does vary by age when it comes to search, but it again differs by country. In the UK, under 45s are three times as likely to use social for search; in the U.S., the numbers are much closer (38% to 23%).
10. Have you built your app yet? Those who use smartphones and tablets are more likely to go straight to a news brand. “The data also indicate that certain mechanisms – like social newsreading apps and ‘push’ news alerts – are disproportionately used on these devices to discover news content.”
11. Appeal to smartphone users to reach out. Of those who share news in the UK, 56% do so through Facebook, 40% through email and 26% through Twitter. In the U.S., Apple smartphone users are 41% more likely to share news than other digital news users.
Interesting stuff. Again access it here.
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Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @SIPAOnline