June 2013

Digital consumption of news is increasing all over the world, thanks to a rising usage of tablets and social media. People are still getting news through TV and newspapers, but mobile devices are expanding where and when people can access media. A survey conducted online earlier this year by Oxford's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism asked people in countries including the U.S., Germany, Spain, Japan, Brazil and Denmark about their news consuming habits.

Here are some key findings:

• News consumption on tablets increased by nearly doubled over the course of 10 months from 2012-2013.
• Denmark has the largest percentage of news usage on smartphones, at 43 percent.
• Close to 33 percent of all users around the world now get their news on at least two digital devices.
• Still, technology is not erasing other ways of getting news: 81 percent of tablet users around the world still watch TV news; 49 percent read the newspaper; and 43 percent listen to radio news.
• Out of all the countries, Brazil has the highest percentage of online consumers -- 90 percent -- and 53 percent choose the Internet as their preferred way of getting news. Meanwhile, more than half of the French consumers still prefer TV, as opposed to 23 percent who choose online.
• Half of the world still pays for a newspaper every week -- but only 5 percent pay for digital news weekly.
• Sixty percent in Brazil say their main source of finding news online is through social media, like Facebook posts. That is 30 percent in the U.S.
• The top three online brands consumed in the U.S. (in order): Yahoo, Fox News, Huffington Post.
• Overall, Germans and the Japanese are the least likely to share and participate in news online.

Barnes & Noble conceded that it cannot compete head-to-head with the iPad and the Kindle Fire.

Reporting a big loss at its Nook e-reader division that dragged down the company’s fourth-quarter results, Barnes & Noble said that it would no longer make its own color tablets. Instead, it will work with third parties, which will make the devices in exchange for co-branding opportunities. The announcement is essentially Barnes & Noble’s white flag, signaling that it cannot compete in a market dominated by Apple, Amazon and Samsung. It will still make and sell the black-and-white versions of the Nook, which generate the majority of the company’s digital book sales.

Voters in some of the nation’s most rural areas, long considered a mainstay of small-government sentiments, have mixed views about the role federal policies should play in their lives, according to polling released by the Center for Rural Affairs.

Surveying more than 800 small-town and countryside residents across the Midwest, the Great Plains and the South, the rural advocacy group found that people were evenly divided about whether Washington should make more effort to strengthen rural communities or whether such involvement “will do more harm than good.” The polling, released just days after a farm bill failed to pass the House of Representatives, paints a nuanced portrait of rural America, one with a strong belief in reducing government spending and regulations, but increasingly in want of more effective policies that promote job training, infrastructure investment and education programs for low-income children outside of cities.

No state let same-sex couples wed until 2004. The military kept its gays in the closet until 2011. And only last year did most Americans tell Gallup they support marriage equality — just in time for much-anticipated Supreme Court rulings on the matter. But Big Tech and gay rights have had a longer-term relationship — with huge benefits for both. The dramatic increase in acceptance of gay people over the past quarter-century has many causes, including the social impact of thousands of people coming out and pop culture’s attitude-changing embrace. Yet it’s also not a coincidence, experts say, that the meteoric trajectories of the LGBT movement and the tech industry occurred simultaneously.