Archive: Opinions

According to a report issued this week by eMarketer, for the first time people are spending more time using their mobile devices than they do reading print newspapers and magazines.  That's an average of 65 minutes per day on mobile devices vs. an average of 26 minutes reading paper newspapers and 18 reading magazines.  The study found that an average of 167 minutes per day are spent on the Internet.

So that's 232 minutes spent on connective devices like phones and pads and pods and computers vs. 44 minutes reading paper newspapers and magazines.  This is not to say that people are reading news on their connective devices during the entire 232 minutes.  The report doesn't say what they are doing on their phones or online.  But as you look at the four year span of the study, it shows that paper newspaper readers spend 12 fewer minutes doing that than they did in 2008, and magazine readers spend 7 fewer minutes reading those.  That implies that people are getting their news elsewhere.

That leaves radio, television, and the Internet.  Television use is up by 20 minutes from 2008, 10 from last year alone.  Radio minutes have been slowly but steadily declining from 102 minutes in 2008 to 94 minutes in 2011.  Internet usage has gone up from 137 minutes in 2008 to 155 last year to 167 in 2011.  And mobile device usage has more than doubled in four years, from 32 minutes per day in 2008 to 65 today.

With an admitted bias for online news, my personal experience seems to explain these statistics.  First of all, I am watching more television, in part because movies have become more expensive and less satisfying.  As local newspaper coverage declined I relied almost entirely on television news for a while, but the anti-journalistic trend toward passing opinion off as fact coupled by the overwhelming onslaught of commercials made it close to impossible to distill news from the medium.

So I started subscribing to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) news feeds from a variety of sources.  And since I got an iPad I could now read my news anywhere, just like the old fashioned kind of newspaper.  But better.  I could make the type bigger.  The ink didn't rub off on my hands.  And I could choose different sources of U.S. news, world news, tech news, etc. to suit my liking.  This à la carte approach is satisfying to me for many reasons. 

1.  It's immediate.  There are ads, but I don't have to wait for them to finish like I have to on TV or radio before I can see the news. 

2.  I can pick and choose.  I don't care what pundits think.  I do care what is happening.  I can quickly scan headlines and articles to pick out the news.  I like U.S. news from U.S. news outlets, but I find it more interesting to read British world news, which not only tells me what's happening in the world, but gives me a clue about what the world thinks about the U.S.  And, of course, I love my local news from the Lansing Star.

3. It is configurable.  Beyond configuring what news sources I get, I can make the font bigger, change the brightness of the backlight for easier readability, easily look up words by touching them when I want to.

4.  It hyperlinks.  I actually read an article about the eMarketer report.  It had a link to the actual eMarketer report.  I clicked it to see the original material without the first writer's analysis.

5.  It's free.  While some of the larger outlets are beginning to charge there is still a wealth of news from major outlets.

Obviously I think the Lansing Star is the wave of the future, and the future is now.  It is basically an old fashioned small town newspaper.  The only thing not old fashioned is the medium it is delivered on.


And that's the thing -- technology changes, but people have been basically the same for eons.  It doesn't matter whether it's me reading news on my pad computer or Fred Flintstone reading the Daily Granite on a rock.  Marshall McLuhan was wrong.  The medium is not the message.  Advances in media bring better ways to get the message.

Fred and I want the same things as he reads his slab of rock and I read my iPad.  We want to be able to find out what's happening in our worlds, locally, nationally, and world wide.  We want to be able to find this news in a way that is convenient.  We don't want advertising to become so important that it obscures our primary purpose of keeping up with our worlds.

Mobile and Internet news is becoming more popular because it is currently the best technology for doing those things.  As with all technologies there will always be people who are intimidated by the new devices, or who are nostalgic for smeary, inky fingers and newsprint smell.  But technologies succeed because they make the daily tasks that matter to us easier, more convenient, better.

The Internet and many of the devices we use to access it do those things.  The numbers in the eMarketer report seem to show that people want improved ways of accessing their information.  Faster, more direct, à la carte.

If you're not into RSS, iPhone/iPad apps like Flipboard and Zite let you simply choose categories of news, and they pick stories from a variety of sources that you can then add to or delete from in a more human way than finding and installing RSS feed addresses.  Or you can just go to the various Web sites.  You get the most control over your news with RSS readers.  On iOS mobile devices apps like Feedler or The Early Edition allow you to manually set up RSS feeds you want.

The Lansing Star, like most news outlets, has a variety of RSS feeds you can subscribe to.  We have ten feeds: eight that take stories from various pages in the Star, one for our events calendar, and even one that shows our weekly tweets.

So I am hoping you are spending some of your 232 Internet/mobile device minutes reading the Star every week.  Those computers, phones, and pads just happen to be the equivalent of Fred's slab of granite that are best suited to bring us our news today.  As the number of people who get their news online grows, local online newspapers become more and more relevant.  That future really is today.

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