Lessons from 48hrs of consumption and observation
Many years ago I made the greatest scientific breakthrough of my life. I calculated the perfect distance from my bed to the exact spot where I can leave my cellphone when I go to bed. Far enough that it forces me to wake up and walk toward it when the alarm goes off, but still close enough that I can walk right back to bed and peruse social media.
So that’s stage one of my media consumption: snooze and peruse. Where do I go online? Facebook — where I meet everybody else online. The reality is that on Facebook I have more subscriptions to media outlets and pages than I do actual friends. Well, maybe not but it’s a close tie. My consumption diary also shows that I will browse Facebook at other points in the day. According to, Eric Blattberg who wrote a piece for Digiday on the media consumption habits of millennials, Facebook is the biggest mobile app (based on unique site visits) both in 2013 and 2014. But all this information on one small screen is overwhelming and I realized (like many others) that I end up doing the media skim trick.
Stage two of my media consumption: glance and then advance. There are a lot of stories where I feel like I know the narrative before reading the story. Man jailed, car crash, women attacked — I am by no means trying to make light of these incidents, but there’s so much going on that I always tend to look for bigger news stories. In most scenarios crime, celebrity and lifestyle stories will not get my attention beyond the headline. In the morning glance period, I choose what gets my attention (international news, big business, global conflict and world politics.) If a story is really good, I email it to myself to read at a later stage. My laptop is the vehicle I use for research and reading those attention-grabbing stories. Give me an island, give me a smartphone, give me Wi-Fi and I will survive.
Blattberg mentioned two other points in his article that related to my media consumption habits. According to their research, Digiday says that millennial men watch a lot of video: more on the Internet than through traditional media. I am not a millennial male, but the rest sounds like an accurate description of me. I was more likely to watch a full story than I was to read the full story. Video trumped text in almost all cases, except the most critical and interesting stories. Can journalists continue to “say,” without “showing”? Should video and text go hand-in-hand in the future, neither one without the other? In Digiday’s analysis, YouTube is the second biggest smartphone app, just behind Facebook.
Finally, I also agree with Digiday that millenials have not abandoned traditional media organizations. The information I process from Facebook still comes from The New York Times, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC News and similar. The only newer media enterprise I purposefully seek out for content is Vice. That’s because Vice has unique stories that I haven’t seen anywhere else. But a trusted brand remains exactly that, it doesn’t matter if the platform is different but quality content always reigns supreme.
