Wednesday, April 27, 2011

The app divide between casual readers and news junkies

Andrew Phelps from Nieman Journalism Labs reporting:
That’s the question I found myself asking upon rereading that report from a couple weeks ago on iPad users’ reactions to The Daily.
The report was put together by knowDigital, a division of market-research firm Coleman Insights, which asked more than 40 iPad owners to download The Daily and use it for two weeks. Sam Milkman, the head of knowDigital, interviewed participants afterward, and he found that even in a group that small, the needs of users were split.
“Very quickly the participants sorted into these two camps,” he told me. One “was a heavy news user found that the depth and breadth of what was offered totally lacking. There was no way that this product was ever going to to satisfy his interest in news.” These are the news junkies: comfortable piecing together a news stream from multiple sources, including blogs and RSS feeds.
And the other camp? Milkman described another user was “completely enthralled by this product. She is not really into the news. She quickly says, ‘It gives me just the right amount of national and international news,’” Milkman says. (Although “This is new to her because she’s not heavily into technology to begin with. And the glitz and the glamour of it draws her in.”) These are casual readers who depend on fewer sources of news. The app was a hit with this group.
Both kinds of readers wanted different things from The Daily. The junkies wanted deeper, broader news coverage, better sports coverage with more personality, and the addition of financial news. They complained the material was too generic, even voiceless. The casual readers showed little interest in international news and asked for coupons. Sports news looked odd next to the gossip.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/04/lessons-from-murdochs-pricey-experiment-casual-readers-consume-differently/?utm_source=Daily+Lab+email+list&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fd116e837e-DAILY_EMAIL

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