Social Media and News: Amazing Graphic

November 15, 2013

“News Use across Social Media Platforms” confirms what I have suspected for a while. The mobile generation has some interesting behavior patterns with regard to news. Among the factoids that the Pew outfit has boiled down to numbers are:

ITEM: YouTube viewers are not using the service to get news. Maybe that explains why experiments with Thomson Reuters proved to be somewhat disappointing.

ITEM: Google Plus is less popular than Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook as a source of news. The push back about Google Plus as a prerequisite for YouTube comments may have more importance than some realize.

ITEM: Facebook is an important source of news. As the demographics of Facebook shift, the importance of news may suggest that Facebook has morphed into a more mature service.

The most interesting “fact” in the report is the apparent importance of Reddit, a service which points to public posts on a range of issues. The Reddit service offers a search function, but I find consistently disappointing. In fact, most of the unusual collections of links and comments are essentially unfindable.

Another interesting facet of the report is the inclusion of some trendy graphics. The diagram below is my favorite.

In my opinion, the good news in the report appears in this passage:

Social media news consumers still get news from a variety of other sources and, in some cases, even more so than the general public does. YouTube, LinkedIn and Google Plus news consumers are more likely than Facebook and Twitter news consumers to watch cable news. Twitter news consumers are among the least likely to turn to local and cable TV. And nearly four-in-ten LinkedIn news consumers listen to news on the radio, compared to about a quarter of the general population.

For now, the digital services cannot celebrate total victory. Publishers of traditional news media live to fight another day. For now.

Stephen E Arnold, November 15, 2013

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under News, Online (general), Publishing

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.