The latest report from Pew Internet confirms what many of us have known for a while now – our friends and socialgraphs are slowly diminishing the influence of the once all-powerful newspaper editors. In the study, Pew found that 75% of Americans who consume news online discover their news through social networking sites or through forwarded e-mail, and 52% of them share news with others through these channels.
This study confirms suspicions we have had for some time – our Facebook news streams and Twitter feeds are becoming our “homepage” for news consumption. NYTimes.com or CNN.com are no longer our browser’s homepage; and if they are, they are not likely the central hub for where we consume our news. The same Pew study found that only 7% of those surveyed are receiving information and news from a single media platform. Our news sources are more diversified than ever, but what’s more important is how we are being driven to this news content.
Before mass online news consumption, we were forced to consume whatever newspaper editors and TV producers decided we should read and watch. In the early years of online news consumption, news aggregation was not a necessity, as our sources for quality online news were slim. In these days, we could set our browser’s homepage to NYTimes.com and be satisfied with the flow of information we were receiving from the newspaper’s site editors. Today, we have the ability to create our own personalized news aggregation services from the news sources we trust most – our ‘friends’ and socialgraphs.
Gone are the days when a single newspaper’s website was the hub for all of one person’s news consumption, linking to various stories within that single hub of news. Today’s news consumption follows a hub-n-spoke model in which social networks are the hub that direct us out to the spokes of various news sources linked to by our friends and trusted news aggregation ‘editors’.
As more Americans rely on social networks as their primary source of news consumption, it will be increasingly important for news organizations, political campaigns and brands to find creative ways to convince individuals to spread news on their behalf. Newspaper editors will continue to have nearly exclusive influence over what is printed by their publications, but their power over driving eyeballs to this content is now in the hands of the masses. Every one of our friends is now a news aggregation ‘editor’ with the power to drive us from our social news hub to the various spokes of trusted news content.
