By Jennifer Bails
Maybe you’re too embarrassed to admit you live tweet during “Dancing With The Stars.” Or maybe you turn your head in bewilderment when your teenage children communicate by texting each other as they loaf side-by-side on the sofa.
But the media industry — science writers, particularly — can no longer afford to look the other way when it comes understanding the fundamental changes occurring in how Americans are getting their news in our “crazy, mixed-up digital world,” said Esther Thorson, associate dean for graduate studies and research and director of research at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri.
Thorson delivered the plenary talk Saturday entitled “The Digital News Consumer” at the ScienceWriters 2011 conference in Flagstaff, Az., where she outlined the sea change taking place in how science news is being generated, where, when, and how often people search for this information, and the ways in which it is being processed.
It was far from auspicious news for the audience of hundreds of media professionals and other science communicators.
The explosion in new media devices (e.g. smart phones, tablet computers) and their functions (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) has created opportunities for everybody to become a “journalist,” including scientists who speak directly to news consumers by blogging about their research or so-called citizen reporters sending video to news outlets, according to Thorson. “Everyone wants their voice to be heard,” she said.
And the online audience continues to grow. More and more people are turning to the Internet as their primary source for science news; a 2006 Pew Research Center study (the most recent data available) found that 40 million Americans rely on the Internet for information about science, second only to television. “Newspapers and magazines, which used to be a major player in the science information area, no longer are,” Thorson said.
Yet, she said, getting science news from the Internet is qualitatively different from making it a point to read the morning paper or watch the evening news, turning people into superficial headline readers rather than informed critical thinkers.
“Appointment time with media is going down, and unscheduled time with media is going up,” Thorson said. “And one of the things we know about unscheduled time is that it is more informal, it’s shorter, and you don’t learn as much.”
Perhaps it’s not all doom and gloom. Thorson said she and her colleagues have developed a predictive model to explain how individuals make their media decisions, which could inform our understanding of how best to reach people with science news in the face of these shifts being brought about by the digital revolution.
One thing is clear: continuing with the status quo won’t be enough to sustain the news industry moving forward, as more people look to sources beyond traditional media outlets for their science information, Thorson said. “These changes that I talked about today are so fundamental to the lives of Americans that we’re going to have to get on a different boat and reach them where they are.”
