In the spring of 2007, The Associated Press embarked on some business research that began quite routinely but would end up reshaping our thinking about journalism in the digital age.

As part of our strategic planning process, we sought to understand news consumption patterns beyond what traditional market data and consumer surveys could tell us. We had a senior management retreat coming up, and we needed something more exciting than regional growth rates to stimulate discussion.

An analyst on the planning staff suggested doing an “ethnography” of young adult consumers, and after a quick Google search to understand exactly what that meant, we decided to give it a try.

To be frank, our expectations were modest. We sought some real people to put a human face on the accelerating shift to online and mobile consumption of news around the world. We knew young people were at the leading edge of that movement and a cultural science study of their media habits sounded like fun.

In the end, it proved to be as transformative as it was fun. The human stories were only the start. From there, the professional anthropologists we commissioned to conduct the research created a model for news delivery that distilled the challenge to its essential elements.

Based on the observed behavior of the subjects in the study, four basic news entry points were identified as the main components of the subjects’ news diets: Facts, Updates, Back Story and Future Stories.

The essential finding: The subjects were overloaded with facts and updates and were having trouble moving more deeply into the background and resolution of news stories.

That model, illustrated in a couple of interesting ways in this report, helped validate the mission we had been charting for the digital marketplace:

Create content that will satisfy a full range of consumers’ news needs and then build the links that will connect people to the relevant news they seek.

Easy to say and harder to accomplish, in a news environment characterized by fragmented interests and mostly passive consumption patterns across online and offline news venues. The research demonstrated quite convincingly that the old models for packaging and delivering news were not connecting with the audience now coming of age around the world. The habits of these young consumers are radically different from those that have characterized news consumption for generations. Newspapers, scheduled broadcasts and even Web sites are giving way to a chaotic system of self-aggregation that is producing disappointing results not only for news producers, but – as this research shows – for consumers as well.

For the World Editors Forum, our initial research has been expanded in two important ways. First, the basic model of consumer behavior that emerged from the original project became the foundation for a broader set of findings and recommendations designed exclusively for release at the forum. Second, we have provided a summary of AP’s own analysis of the model and the practical work that has taken shape in response to these and other digital trends. As further grounding for the findings, a brief case study of The Telegraph of London is included to illustrate how one well-known newspaper has dealt with the kind of challenges the model highlights.

Special thanks go to our partners in this research, the Context- Based Research Group of Baltimore, Maryland.

– AP Strategic Planning | June 2008

Download A New Model for News: Studying the Deep Structure of Young-Adult News Consumption

PDF format, 3.4MB, 71Pages.

A New Model for News
Studying the Deep Structure of Young-Adult News Consumption
A Research Report from The Associated Press and the Context-Based Research Group

© 2008 The Associated Press. June 2008

Contents:

Prologue 3
Behavioral Field Study and Findings 5
AP’s Understanding of the Model 51
The Telegraph, a Case Study 66
Acknowledgements 71

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