A guest post from my brother, Trevor, in response to the news consumption survey:

A couple of points in your article.

The first is your use of the word “consumption”. I think it might just be a suitable behind-the-scenes word for news, but I’m not sure if it’s the word “for the public, to the public”. To use an analogy that is closer to the word “consume”, you may consume drugs because you’re an addict, you may consume a Big Mac and fries because you’re hungry, but you wouldn’t “consume” a 500 dollar meal for two at a Michelin-starred restaurant. You’d taste it, you’d enjoy it, and you’d savour it.

Thus also for news. One broad division of “news” might be: things that could make a difference to our lives, private and professional, by knowing them, and things that definitely won’t. Glancing at a paper, it’s clear to me that nearly everything for nearly everyone falls into the second category.

And I mention this to explain the lesser popularity aggregators are facing. The “facts”, the events themselves, are not as important as the “story” or the narrative. We are not interested in purely in events – because they rarely directly matter to us in themselves – but rather in the manner in which they are presented. News aggregators tend to strip this all away. People say they aren’t interested in getting information from sources that reflect their viewpoints, but then they buy The Guardian if they’re leftwing, and The Telegraph if they are to the right. If they are supremely proud of their independent minds, they buy The Independent, which flatters them on that too. All this because the story becomes the entertainment, told in the way the reader likes.

Ok, don’t know if any of this helps, but “consuming” news doesn’t sound at all like something that’s in itself enjoyable. And if a thing is futile, which most “news” is, it had better be fun.

In general I agree, particularly on consumption; news consumption certainly doesn’t sound like much fun. Maybe instead of describing people as news consumers we should describe them as news connoisseurs? On whether readers want news that reflects their views I’m not so sure. US media blogger Steve Boriss notes here that he prefers our lively politically bias press to US newspaper’s dry liberal consensus. However, on the other hand, personalised news services seem to be a one way ticket to the deadpool (see Techcrunch write-up here). I guess we want our news channels to talk to us, but not only to us.

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This is part 3 of our online news consumption survey. Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here. 

What they want

Interestingly what respondents don’t want is ‘articles with a similar outlook on the world as myself’ (11% scored 4 or 5). In the comments respondents specifically asked for articles giving opposing views on the topic. Another factor that wasn’t valued was ‘strong community’ with only 19% scoring 4 or 5.  
Thoughts: Basically, what everyone’s ideal is an easy to use site that selects relevant high quality articles from a broad range of publications in a timely fashion. This was a very positive result for us as this was exactly what we had set out to achieve! Also interesting is the needs of lighter news consumers is similar to heavy news consumers, which means that if we can develop a great product for heavy news consumers we will have a great product for lighter users as well. Comprehensive coverage of blogs was low down the list (44% scoring 4 or 5), suggesting again that this is a low priority.

When asked what one thing the site should do the response was: 

Thoughts: The personalisation that most people wanted was a behind the scenes tracking of interests (much like the way Amazon recommends products) rather than them having to manually personalise. Many of the elements wanted raise deep questions about how news should be organised and presented. It will be fun working with everyone as we develop the product to see if we are hitting those wants. 

Current news sources

The top news sources were:

1. BBC (25 mentions)
2. New York Times (9 mentions)
3. Guardian (8 mentions)
4. Google News (7 mentions)

The BBC and the Guardian both received significant praise for the design and usability of the site. Even though in general the respondents were very internet literate and higher than average online news consumers, use of news aggregators was low with only Google News getting a significant number of mentions. We will need to dig further to understand the underlying reasons for that.

Nigel

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We are currently working on an element in Hubdub which involves presenting news items linked to a chart showing price over time. The New York Times is a master at this and I thought I’d share a couple of great examples. The first example is Enron:

It is a really data rich graphic. Edward Tufte, the design guru, made it his ‘graphic of the day’ and gave a nice write up here.

The second example is from a recent article in the NYT on match fixing in tennis (how come it always malfeasance that generates nice charts?). Here they have show the news flow against Betfair’s odds on the match:

Article here.

Really nice chart however there is a problem: The odds are really confusing. Even the interpretation gets them wrong on the chart. In the second box, Arguello isn’t the 1 to 7 favorite he is the 1.70 favorite which means a $1 bet would win 70 cents (1 to 7 would mean you would win 14 cents). Also most people are used to thinking when the graph goes up it is ‘good’. However here it is bad. Davydenko’s odds lengthen which means the market thinks he is less likely to win. Very confusing isn’t it?

That’s why at Hubdub we are pooling our collective brainpower to come up with a simple intuitive chart that relates price information and news flow on one page. Here is the design, let us know what you think

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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: 

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.

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Too funny for mere words (but a prize for whoever gives the best caption in the comments).

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Hi everyone,

I have now collated the results from the online news consumption survey that a lot of you kindly completed for us. I thought I would share the results with you. I have broken the results into three parts. Here is Part 1:

Part 1 – News consumption
In total we had 33 responses to the online news consumption survey. I have broken the respondents down into three groups according to their level of online news consumption:

Group Consumption per day Respondents

Light < 30 mins 12
Medium 30 – 59 mins 11
Heavy > 60 mins 10

Eight of the respondents where from North America. In general North American respondents followed different news sources (as would be expected) but also they were more likely to read blogs. In general there was a surprisingly high consensus in the answers to most questions (apart from interests).

Overall consumption
On average respondents spent about 42 minutes per day reading news online and checking it on average 4.3 times per day. Heavy news consumers checked 6.3 times per day on average.

Reasons for consumption
The top three reasons why respondents follow news were (all respondents):

For heavy news consumers the top three were:

Thoughts: I think it is very interesting that people have an intrinsic need for news, beyond mere enjoyment or some utilitarian purpose. The jobs of the respondents who need news do their job well were consultants, traders and journalists.

Interests

All news consumers:

Heavy news consumers:

Thoughts: This is obviously influenced by the unscientific way we’ve conducted this survey. However it does suggest that Tech, Biz, World and Politics should be our lead categories. I would expect Sport, Entertainment, Economics, General and Science to be our second tier categories.

Please do give your comments below. I will post the second part of the findings (Respondents current online news experience) on Monday.

Nigel

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