Week Nine: The Australian

Article from: The Australian
Title: Exclusively online new readers are less informed
Date: October 6, 2008
Author: Annette Nazaroff

Link: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24449672-13243,00.html

This article explains research conducted at the media agency, Total Advertising and Communications, into the news consumption habits of 200 Australians. The research found that overall Australians are consuming more news due to the internet, but over less topics. This is because one can specialise their search for news using the internet as opposed to newspapers or radio. However the research also found that those who read newspapers usually ended up reading an article that they hadn't planned to, meaning they become more knowledgable over a wider range of topics than internet news readers.

I can see how this research highlights an important point about news consumption, however I also think that we could increase the range of topics explored by users on internet news websites by changing the design of them. Consumers want to find things easily and quickly and this is why they are opting for reading the 'top stories', because every news website has them and promotes them on every page. Maybe some of the websites could include lesser known stories under headings such as 'points of interest' or 'story of the day'. People aren't going to go searching for something they know nothing about or don't even know exists, that is why news websites need to show users what kinds of stories are avaliable. I think they would be more effective if websites were set up so that the unknown stories flocked the pages and the user had to go in search of the well-known stories. But then again, I'm sure big business wouldn't make as much money that way so what would be the point?

The article also suggests that if you "put a group of solus internet consumers in a room together, they would be less likely to know about the same news items" as a result of being able to specifically search news based on their own interests. I don't think that this is necessarily a bad thing and could even be a way to introduce people to more news items. Think about it, if a class of say 25 high school students all searched news items of specific interest to themselves on the internet and then shared their finding with the rest of the class, everyone in that class would know 25 times the news they had on their own. If they had all simply read The Advertiser or The Australian, this would not happen, they would all know the same news. Internet news provides us with a special opportunity to find things of interest to us and as long as we share our findings with others and do not live in an isolated world, that can only be a good thing!