More than a quarter of Americans now read news on mobile devices and are highly engaged, voraciously consuming news and information from their phones. A Pew Center report found that over 80% of adults own cell phones and 37% use them to access the web. Those who read news on mobile devices are also likely to participate by commenting and sharing content. The report highlights the importance of mobile for media companies as people increasingly look for convenience and their phone is the most accessible device.

1. by Damon Kiesow

2. Journalism.org

3. A new report from the Pew Center’s Project for Excellence
in Journalism reveals that more than a quarter of
Americans read news on mobile devices, and those who
do are highly engaged participants as well as being
voracious grazers of news and information.

4. The report, “Understanding the Participatory News
Consumer,” examines the impact of digital media on news
consumption and interaction behaviors. A section of the
study focused specifically on the growth of mobile devices
reveals that more than 80 percent of adults now own cell
phones and 37 percent use their phones to access the
Web.

5. According to Tom Rosenstiel, Director of PEJ, “Those
numbers are only going to go up as the penetration of
smart phones grows. The computer of the future is held in
your hand.”

6. And, in fact, those figures mirror a recent report from the
Federal Communications Commission, which studied both
wired and wireless broadband connectivity in the United
States. The FCC is currently pushing to expand the wireless
spectrum available to mobile broadband providers in
anticipation of strong growth in consumer demand for
those services.

7. The PEJ report highlights the importance of that trend to
media organizations. “What the data shows is people are
increasingly looking for news at their convenience, and
nothing is more convenient than the device in your
pocket,” Rosenstiel said in an interview Friday.

8. Rosenstiel: “People are increasingly looking for news at
their convenience, and nothing is more convenient than
the device in your pocket.”Another finding of the PEJ
report: 46 percent of “on-the-go” news consumers are also
“news participators,” meaning they actively contribute to
the creation or distribution of information by commenting
on articles, tagging content, contributing images, videos
and articles, or sharing a link with their social network.

9. PEJ further identifies a highly engaged sub-group of
mobile news consumers, about 13 percent of U.S. adult
Internet users, who are characterized by daily news
readership across multiple platforms including mobile,
online, print and television.

10. The study reveals that while those highly engaged
consumers are reading a lot of news, they do so from
multiple outlets on multiple platforms. Just 7 percent of
Americans get their news from a single source, while 46
percent visit four to six sources, in print, Web, TV and
mobile on a typical daily basis.

11. Rostenstiel said the notion of foraging for news can be a
positive one for news organizations. “People graze but
they don’t graze very far.”

12. He noted the average engaged news reader has a half-
dozen sources they return to frequently. “So, while people
are hunting for what they are interested in, they are not
hunting everywhere. They are hunting among a landscape
of sources they know and are familiar with.”

13. http://mobiledesign.inworcesterma.com//