Mobile devices bolster 'lure of traditional news brands'

More than a quarter of Americans receive news via mobile devices, with digital news consumers "more likely" to access articles directly from a news website or app on a regular basis than from social media links, according to a US report.

The annual State of the Media report from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, now in its ninth year, found that 27 per cent of Americans surveyed receive news via a mobile device, which has been credited with "strengthening the bond with traditional news brands".

According to the report, which asked more than 3,000 adults in the US how news is accessed on digital devices, the highest amount of respondents (36 per cent) said they go direct to a news outlet's website or app "very often", which rises to 38 per cent when looking at tablet users alone.

This is compared to 9 per cent who said the same for accessing news via social media links.

A total of 32 per cent said they use search to access news "very often" while 29 per cent "use news organising sites like Topix or Flipboard".

When looking at the results for users on desktop/laptop computers, both access to news direct from a news site and via search achieved the same results with 30 per cent each.

The report also highlighted "the extent to which technology intermediaries now control the future of news"  and the "closer financial ties between technology giants and news".

"As a part of YouTube's plans to become a producer of original television content, a direction it took strongly last year, it is funding Reuters to produce original news shows.

"Yahoo recently signed a content partnership with ABC News for the network to be its near sole provider of news video. AOL, after seeing less than stellar success with its attempts to produce its own original content, purchased The Huffington Post.

"With the launch of its Social Reader, Facebook has created partnerships with The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and others."

The report also referred to the moves by some traditional news outlets to venture into new digital revenue streams, such as online subscriptions and apps, with "as many as 100 newspapers ... expected in coming months to join the roughly 150 dailies that have already moved to some kind of digital subscription model".

But the research claims "these efforts are still limited and that few news companies have made much progress in some key new digital areas".

The challenges facing the newspaper industry have also "become more acute", the report claims.

"Even as online audiences grew, print circulation continued to decline. Even more critically, so did ad revenues. In 2011, losses in print advertising dollars outpaced gains in digital revenue by a factor of roughly 10 to 1, a ratio even worse than in 2010. When circulation and advertising revenue are combined, the newspaper industry has shrunk 43 per cent since 2000."

The report adds: "In sum, the news industry is not much closer to a new revenue model than a year earlier and has lost more ground to rivals in the technology industry. But growing evidence also suggests that news is becoming a more important and pervasive part of people’s lives. That, in the end, could prove a saving factor for the future of journalism."

However, apart from print media, "most media sectors" experienced growth in audiences last year with news sites recording a rise of 17 per cent in audiences for 2011, the report says.

Other key statistics on news access by device from the report:

• 70 per cent of desktop/laptop owners get news using computers and laptops
• 56 per cent of tablet owners use their devices for news consumption
• 51 per cent of smartphone owners use their phones to access news

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