My Media Consumption Trends
For the past two days, I made sure to keep very accurate accounts of the news media I consumed. I felt I was consuming news at a lower amount than normal because I spent most of my time investigating the Greek community in LA for one of my classes, and was not using my phone as much as I usually do. I was talking to sources and at different locations for a lot of my time during these two days, and I think my typical news consumption is a bit higher. Tallied up, I consumed media for almost five hours total, which I assume is much less than an average two days.
When looking at my news sources, the results were what I expected. I spend a lot of time driving in Los Angeles so a lot of my consumption was in the car during commutes. I was interested to see that I did consume a lot of news on my phone, but it was mostly prompted. I didn’t realize before that the iPhone News app actually does a good job curating notifications for me and pushing notifications I will open. I found myself being prompted to open news frequently from that app and other iPhone apps for news companies more than I expected. This means that push notifications are a pretty big part of my news consumption, and that news producers should be very aware of wording of the notifications and how many to push a day. I think if I see too many notifications on my phone I will be more likely to ignore them. I also noticed that I rarely comment or share media. I think this is because I prefer to talk about my opinions in person, rather than share thoughts online. I don’t tend to interact with stories online, but I do bring them up often in casual conversation.
I usually watch more TV news, but my television wasn’t working during this experiment. I want to note that because my consumption is not usually so heavy on my phone and computer. I felt like these past few days, I was missing out on stories that were not breaking because of this. I did check out CNN online and local news sites frequently for these stories, but found myself having a harder time concentrating on online articles because I would switch around a lot. I also thought it was interesting that I didn’t rely on Twitter. I did once to check on a story, but I feel like many people usually turn to this source to find stories. It’s something I hope to lean on more on the future because there are a lot of useful resources, but I get overwhelmed by the amount on Twitter. The space seems cluttered with a lot of good but also irrelevant news.
I pay for the New York Times digital subscription and the LA Times digital subscriptions (as presents from my parents), but don’t pay for any other news. I expect to be able to access breaking news for free. I don’t feel as though I’m over paying for my subscriptions. Something else I am aware of is that I am not the normal news consumer. As a Journalism student, a lot more news appeals to me naturally. I think news producers need to continue to report and share news on mobile apps. This is where I received most my news. My biggest takeaway from the assignment may be that push notifications are essential for news organizations for my generation. I received the second most amount of news from NPR, which my parents donate to every year. I am not sure if this is typical for someone of my age, but I don’t think it is. I think tuning into things like TV and radio while doing everyday activities like driving and cooking is another way consumers receive news, like myself. Overall I wasn’t shocked by these findings, but I am more mindful of how often I am using my devices and how.
