Wednesday, February 3, 2016

The future of mobile journalism told by PEW State of the Media


PEW State of the Media 
by Phoebe Dinner

The PEW State of the Media 2015 report addresses the future of digital journalism. As people quickly are switching from print sources to online, the future is uncertain.

Senior Bailey Hayek was surprised to learn that people are primarily using their desktops to access news online instead of their phones. However, a statistic from the PEW report states that 39 out of 50 news sites get more traffic from mobile devices than from desktop computers.

To contrast this statistic, the PEW report states that people visiting sites on their mobile phones will stay on the site for a shorter amount of time than they would on their desktop.

The amount of time people spend on their mobile phones is certainly growing. Simultaneously there is a rise of the social Web where people get news from scrolling through their news feed and looking at what their “friends” deem as important news that is share worthy.

The newspaper industry has suffered economically from society’s increased use of mobile journalism. Newspaper ad revenue went down another 4% to $19.9 billion, which is less than half of what it was a decade ago, according to the PEW report.

Even though there is a decrease in print news, people are still searching for news on their mobile devices.

“People are constantly on their phones checking for the latest news updates,” Hayek said. “And without mobile journalism the news outlets would be falling behind.”

The top online news entity is Yahoo-ABC News, which has a total digital population of roughly 130 million.  It is becoming more complicated to identify and rank the most popular digital news destinations because there is so many more coming to the surface.


Mobile journalism has permitted more people to become mobile journalists and deem what news is important and what news is worth sharing to their community.

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