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Monday, September 4

Browsing the Newspaper, Reading the Net

Everyday I feel, there is a war out there between the two media worlds that I am familiar with - the off-line and the on-line. NRS 06 says print readership is actually on the rise! But so has internet penetration, the visitors to MySpace and Orkut. The blogosphere has reached 50mn and shows no signs of abating.

And I,the media grazer am juggling between the off-line and the on-line worlds. Work demands that I consume a lot of information and news. So, in 2006 am getting four newspapers up from two last year( the subsidised annual subscriptions are the real cause). And grazing a lot of NET and TV as well!

But my newspaper reading time has not dramatically increased. Net readership time has! Increasingly I find myself browsing the newspapers, and reading the net, be it wikipedia, google news RSS feeds, John Grant and Russell Davies blogs, and more trivia and junk than ever before!

My media habits in the last 2 years have changed beyond recognition.
- I consume news as entertainment
- There is no fixed time of news consumption. They happen like internet packets all through the day.
- TV is for breaking the news and chat shows
- Internet for following up stories of interest
- My news sources have ballooned from 2-3 to at least 6-8 on a regular basis.
- News sharing is a new acquired habit
- And recently I have started logging and blogging my POV on the news that I browse.

But for the organised media, am still the SEC A, age 30-35 unit. I guess there are thousands of media animals whose grazing grounds and habits have fundamentally changed. Yet they do not feature in the large scale, print or TV skewed researches.

Would love to hear similar tales of new grazing habits from you...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

i am more of a words person so my life is pretty simple when it comes to news consumption. i use the TV like the summary slide and gather more on the issues of interest by diggin deeper into 2-3 newspapers (depending on weekday and weekends)i subscribe to.

then, i also catch the 2 great magazines, time & economist (always carry them with me, so that i can grab a quickie of an article during a cab journey or something).

but, reflecting on news as the new entertainment, i would like to extend it a bit by saying that they are the 'soaps for men' (apologies Mr Sinha)