How people get their news is changing rapidly, that will forever change the face of news gathering and public relations.
New statistics were just released in the State of the News Media 2011, an annual report by the Pew Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
The most striking finding is how fast people are migrating to online news, whether it's on their smart phone, a tablet like the iPad, a laptop or desktop PC.
According to the report:
- 47 percent of Americans get some form of local news on a mobile device.
- For the first time, online news beat newspapers as a source.
- Also for the first time, online ad revenue exceeded newspaper ad revenue.
Now, there are caveats in this report.
People aren't reading big local stories on their Droids and iPhones.
Mostly, they're looking up the weather, checking out traffic jams before heading home and looking up restaurant reviews.
Those kind of quick bits of local news are easy to find on your phone. It's hard to read a long newspaper story.
However, the trend is accelerating, and the growth of tablets like the iPad, and similar devices like the Kindle, mean more and more people will have a portable device that does make it easy to read things of length, like newspapers and books.
According to the report, 7 percent of Americans said they owned a tablet of some sort in January of 2011.
That may not sound like much, especially compared to the 84 percent who owned smart phones. Yet that number is double the number reported a mere four months earlier.
So what does this mean for the business of public relations?
- Distributing material to more outlets than ever before, as the news businesses becomes more fragmented and localized.
- Tailoring your material in more formats than ever before, with mobile versions of blogs and websites quickly turning from a nice option into a necessity.
- Producing the same material in different formats and platforms.