Younger generation gets news from community, not from news sites (Prof Dr Jo Groebel)
Speaker: Prof Dr Jo Groebel - Director, The German Media Institute
New Media Conference & Expo 2008 - Bucharest (live blogging from the event)
Some highlights:
- Research shows that the younger generation doesn't visit news online sites, they collect their news from their online community, and they trust it more.
- We not only show a change in the role of the media, but also in the role of journalists in the community and how they interact.
- We used to think in terms of demography, but many of the old demographic metrics no longer apply. People are more centred on information and situational needs.
- A lot of what we're discussing has been around for 40 years. The Internet has been around in some form since 1969. Most of the ideas that are now in the spotlight have already been discussed. Online community, for example, started in the 90's.
- People are primarily using media for information. We've done studies on what people remember from news items. Within five minutes people forget about 95% of what they read or consume in the news. A lot of information consumption is about the "kick" users get from consuming it.
- The online world increases emotional arousal and information kicks. The more you 'arouse' them, the more likely is your information to be successful. You also need to be aware that if you go beyond a certain level of emotional arousal, you lose the user as well.
- people are now focussing more on visual kicks. Levels of visual intelligence has increased significantly, and levels of verbal intelligence has decreased.
- Lots of media use is about excitement, mood. It is absolutely crucial to target this emotional area.
- Unlike TV, online and newspapers are high-attention media. Whereas TV may be on in the background (and the ratings show that you are watching although your attention may not be there, also for ads).
- Community - even in the world of user content creation, it is still the professionals who produce the quality content and are the catalysts/moderators of what happens in the community. This is not going to change.
- The most crucial change in the online world is that you don't need to care about demography, in quite the same way.
- Convergence has become a reality, a people expect to get everything on all platform, e.g. mobile.
- Immediacy has also become the expectation.
- English has not become as prevalent online as many expected. People still use their local languages mostly online.
* Context and disclaimer: reports from the conference were captured in real-time. If anything is well expressed, it is to the credit of the presenter. If anything is not completely clear or could have been put better, it is probably down to me. I didn't try to capture everything, just some of the key soundbites. Anything that is my comment, will be qualified as such, under "DD:"