Young people (18-30 yo) spend almost half as much time reading, listening or watching the news than their grandparents, according to Pew Research.
According to Poynter, this is terrible news for the news. “News organizations clearly and correctly see digital readership as vital to their future. But again, this data suggests that expectations have to be modest with respect to regaining the huge audience the media once enjoyed.”…
According to Jeff Jarvis, this is proof that Millenials are just smarter (I told you, “lazy” is the new “intelligent”!) in the way they access news. Thanks to tools like Twitter and Circa they don’t have “to sift through a newspaper to find what matters to them and more time sitting, passively watching an hour or more of local and national TV news to get a one-size-fits-all summary.”
Interestingly, the author of Buzzmachine comes up with a service to make the experience more efficient overall… NewsPal.
“I want News Pal to be an emergent system that watches what I watch in news and feeds me accordingly with no effort on my part. If it sees that I watch news about Android, it should prioritize Android news. If it sees that I stop caring about Android after I buy a phone, it should stop caring for me. If it sees that I never read sports, it shouldn’t give me football stories. If it knows where I live and work, it should give me relevant news for those locations. Of course, this system should also give me the news that everyone will want to know, feeding me reports on the Kenyan mall attack even if I haven’t shown an attraction to Kenyan news. Editors recognize those breakthrough stories. So does Google News’ algorithm.
I also want News Pal to cut through the worsening clutter of repetition. (…) In the net, my News Pal would give me greater relevance because it knows me, higher quality because it knows news sources, and greater efficiency because it reduces the noise in news.“
Sounds cool and oddly familiar, doesn’t it? Like he’s the cousin of some News Concierge or something… ^^