New Media vs Old School

NEW MEDIA vs OLD SCHOOL:   by Amy Fond
(Reading time:  90 seconds)

In the past few weeks, two interesting media studies were released. But if you were looking online, you probably missed them.

The most recent from eMarketer shows Americans are spending some 23 hours per week online with social media sites. That's almost a full day each week spent on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and more. Imagine, you wake up at 7am, sit down in front of your computer, and then surf social media sites till 6am the next morning.

To many the findings come as no surprise. Think about the last day you spent without even looking on-line at all.   

The more eyebrow raising study comes from McKinsey and Company. They say most of our news consumption… isn’t coming from our computer. 

Yep, even though we’re on-line for almost a solid day a week, we’re still getting our news from other mediums.

According to McKinsey, 35% of our news is coming from legacy media like newspapers, compared with only 4% from our laptop and just 2% from our smart phones.

We’re also reading newspapers for a longer amount of time than we’re reading news on a site like CNN.com. A reader, on average, spends a little over a minute a day on a news website, compared to some 27 minutes per day lingering on a newspaper. And on a weekend we’re spending close to an hour with the Sunday paper.

The study doesn’t say why, but part of the answer may be that newspaper readers are more invested consumers. If you’re already online for 23 hours, chances are you’ll skim a news site. But carving out time to pick-up the paper, and sit down to read it, requires a different level of commitment and attention.

We may spend 14% of our week, tweeting, posting, browsing and blogging, but when it comes to getting the news we surprisingly still prefer paper.

Something to think about before your next interview with the press. More people than you think will be reading your words!