Understanding the Participatory News Consumer

The overwhelming majority of Americans (92%) use multiple platforms to get their daily news. And the Internet is now the third most-popular news platform. It falls behind local and national television news and ahead of national print newspapers, local print newspapers and radio. Still, the overall reality is that the Internet fits into a broad pattern of news consumption by Americans. Six in ten (59%) get news from a combination of online and offline sources on a typical day.

Just 7% of American adults get their daily news from a single media platform, and those who do typically rely on either the Internet or local television news.

The Internet and mobile technologies are at the center of the story of how people's relationship to news is changing. In today's new multi-platform media environment, people's relationship to news is becoming portable, personalized, and participatory:

• Portable: 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.
• Personalized: 28% of Internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.
• Participatory: 37% of Internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.

The rise of social media like social networking sites and blogs has helped the news become a social experience for consumers; people use their social networks and social networking technology to filter, assess, and react to news. They also use traditional email and other tools to swap stories and comment on them.