Why Digital News Consumers Are So Promiscuous

One of the most surprising stats to come out of the new Pew Research Center study released earlier this week is that 65% of online news consumers say they don't have a single favorite website for news. That number inevitably brings you to one of two conclusions: 1) The web is still a wide open marketplace for new content startups because there are precious few dominant players in the space, or 2) Digital news consumers are far more likely to be promiscuous when it comes to the news. Because the web makes it so easy to sample many media sites (and they are largely free), it's far more likely for people not to have a single favorite website for news. Indeed, the study also showed that only seven percent of Americans get their news from a single source and that 46% of Americans get their news from four to six media platforms on a typical day.

That sounds about right to me. At BusinessWeek, we once asked McKinsey and Co. to study our web users and found to our surprise and chagrin that our brand users were remarkably promiscuous. On average, they visited 18 different media brands--TV networks, newspapers, magazines, and websites--a week to satisfy their news appetites. At first, we thought this was a shocking number, showing little loyalty to our brand. On reflection, however, we came to realize that many of the readers of BusinessWeek are news junkies. They devour information and analysis, and it's obvious that they would seek news from lots of sources on a regular basis. At the time, BusinessWeek was not a news site to be depended on for the most important breaking news, but rather an analysis and insight website, picking and choosing the issues on which to opine and dig deeper. But I digress.

I think the fact that 65% of Americans don't have a single favorite website means both 1 and 2, not either or. This finding tells me there is still plenty of room on the web for new, smart ways to make the news more participatory, personal, and social. New web entrepreneurs who adopt disruptive technologies and business models are likely to prosper. And because of the overwhelming wealth of information on the web, it's unlikely that people might have a "single favorite website" for news. To my way of thinking, that's a good thing, assuring that readers get a wide diversity of opinions and ideas from a wide variety of brands.

A few other fascinating results from the Pew study: Our relationship to news is becoming "portable, personalized, and participatory." Some 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones; about 28% of people on the internet have customized their home page to include news from sources on topics that interest them, and some 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites from Facebook to Twitter.

Concludes Pew: "To a great extent, people's experience of news, especially on the internet, is becoming a shared social experience as people swap links in emails, post news stories on their social networking site feeds, highlight news stories in their Tweets, and haggle over the meaning of events in discussion threads. More than eight in ten online news consumers get or share links in emails."

I suspect these numbers will dramatically increase in the near future as news becomes even more of a social activity. The old rule of thumb that only 10% of Internet users are pro-active and only 10% of them participate by writing comments on stories is just that: old. Increasingly, as this Pew study clearly shows, more and more people are contributing to news. It has become a "shared social experience."  It's why I believe deep and meaningful engagement with your audience is an essential ingredient for a news organization.

What do you think?

The Biggest Mistake Media Companies Make Online

Yesterday, Media Industry News asked me three questions, one of which I shared with my Tweeps: What is the biggest mistake media companies make online? Nearly two dozen people weighed in with their own answers--and almost all of those responses are very good. Yet, I have my own take on this question that differs from most of the answers I received.

For all the talk about the importance of digital media, most traditional brands boast cultures, people, and processes that protect their dying assets (ie. print) at the expense of what is growing (ie. digital). There are a lot of reasons for this, and some of them are good ones. Print still brings in the vast majority of revenue. It somehow feeds in a more satisfying way the ego of editors and writers. And because the most resources are always devoted to the print product, the digital side remains a stepchild to the so-called main act--even when that act is unprofitable and dying.

As John Gardner once observed, most of the things that prevent the renewal of an organization can be found in the mind. It's not a matter of new ideas. "There is usually no shortage of new ideas," wrote Gardner in Self-Renewal. "The problem is to get a hearing for them. And that means breaking through the crusty rigidity and stubborn complacency of the status quo." Yet the rules, customs, and procedures in organizations always favor the past. That's why culture trumps strategy all the time. The cultural cues are that print (the past) is more important than digital (the future).

The Coming Media Boom

Amid all the havoc and pain in our business, I'm going to make a bold prediction: Over the next three years, we're going to witness one of the biggest booms in media ever. It will occur not in print, of course, but in the online world. And it will largely be fueled by forced media entrepreneurs, laid off writers and editors, lower barriers to entry, and the opportunity for tens of thousands of well-trained journalists to create something of value that they can run and own.

That old line about freedom of press belonging only to those who own a press is just that--old. For years now, pretty much anyone who has access to a computer and the Internet owns a press. But there was still a missing ingredient: vast numbers of journalists with the courage and the skill to use the Net to do their own thing. That's much less true today because of the layoffs of tens of thousands of highly qualified writers and editors who have been thrown out on the street by their dying employers. Many of them will not be able to find jobs in the field; they'll have to invent their jobs and that will result in this new media boom.

This generation of skilled unemployed has a few other things going for itself.

1) First-mover advantage is no advantage at all. We've now seen a number of successful web models, from Drudge and the Huffington Post, to the rise of an ecosystem of news generators in many cities and regions around the country. Followers have significant competitive advantages over first movers because they can learn from their mistakes and they can take advantage of better and cheaper technology. Today there are many more open source (low-cost and easy-to-use) options for would-be entrepreneurs to exploit. There were dozens of search engines before Google, but it took a follower to master the search market. There also were dozens of MP3 players before the iPod. Now is the time to follow the early pioneers.

2) Labor is cheap and the monopolists are dying. As the traditional winners of our business continue to die, there will be lots of opportunities for new low-cost models run by smart, highly motivated people--and there will be many vacuums to fill online. As bad as the past three years have been in our business, the next three will be positively brutal. Take a look at this chart that illustrates the staggering decline of magazine publishing income over the past decade but also gives you a glimpse of the opportunity today.

3) Despite the proliferation of blogs and websites, we're only at the very beginning of a media revolution. Many of these new ventures in the coming media boom will fail. After all, the odds are always against the entrepreneur. But many of them will succeed and change the game.

Why I Gave Up My Print Job

Shortly after moving to the world of digital journalism nearly three years ago, I was interviewed by Talking Business. Here's a link to that interview and my thoughts at the time.