This is part 2 of the results of our online news survey: 

Search

Most respondents only occasionally use search (only 15% scored a 4 or 5) to find news. Of those that do, 95% scored it OK to very good (3 to 5). Heavy news consumers were similar on this to other users.  Users that use search use it for a real mix of stuff – company specific, breaking stories, archive, alternative opinions, stuff not on their main news site etc. Thoughts: Looks like Google does an OK job here, let’s not compete with them J 

Blogs

56% of all news consumers read blogs occasionally to regularly (3 to 5), while 91% of heavy news consumers read them occasionally to regularly (64% regularly or very regularly). There is a real mix in the blogs that the respondents read with two respondents following in excess of 200 blogs. Respondents found the blogs they read primarily from friends. Another major source is from links from other blogs. Respondents follow blogs through either RSS readers or, to a lesser extent, email. They select posts to read by scanning the headlines and the heavy blog followers tend to skip a lot of the articles.

Thoughts: While blogs are increasing in importance mainstream news sites still have primacy for news. In naming their main news sources only 5 mentions were made of blogs compared with over a 100 of mainstream news sources. This reflects that blogs are strong for opinion and expertise, only a small minority of them break news stories (I’ve noticed that tech blogs starting to break more stories).  The way most respondents report finding blogs helps reinforce the importance of word of mouth as a means to getting new users. This will form a major element of the marketing strategy.  

News discovery, quality and tracking 

All news consumers: 

Reason	% scored 3, 4 or 5
On your favourite general news sites, how often do you find the top news stories are relevant or interesting to you?	87%
How often do you try to find all the high quality news articles about a topic?	75%
How enjoyable is that process?	69%
Do you ever give up looking for a news article you know must exist?	47%
How often do you find political bias (or other types of bias) negatively effect reporting of a story?	78%
How often do you find publications changing their forecasts/viewpoints on events without reference to their earlier forecast/viewpoint?	50%
Do you ever read to the end of a news story and feel you’ve gained little or no new information?	87%
Do you ever get to the end of a news article and would like to find out more but nothing more is offered?	81%
How hard do you find it to form a picture of how a running story has developed?	75%
How hard do you find it to develop a picture of what the most important factors are in a story’s development?	77%

Heavy news consumers reported similar responses to all apart from regularity of finding all quality articles and gaining no new information from an article were 100% of respondents scored 3-5 for both questions.

Thoughts: Most news consumers do regularly search out high quality articles on topics, but it appears they tend to do it more on news sites rather than on Google. Abandonment of finding news articles was fairly low although a number of respondents reported frustration at the level of spam articles. Some very interesting results are the ones highlighted in bold. About 80% respondents report that occasionally (3) to very regularly (5) they experience negative bias, poor quality articles and poor linkages between articles and the underlying story. About 40-50% of respondents experience these five issues regularly to very regularly.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Tags: news, news survey

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Interesting stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.