Digital News Usage Trends in Australia

London.
The next speaker at Transforming Audiences is my QUT colleague Anna Daniel, who presents on Australian consumer trends in digital news. She also highlights the shift towards a participative Web and the confusion over the use of online news by Australian users, and points to the challenging position of news organisations in the face of declining advertising revenues in print and unclear revenue models for online news sources. The present resource was conducted in the context of a case study of the online-only newspaper Brisbane Times and the online-only entertainment site The Vine.

A preference for online news amongst the study's respondents was driven by perceptions that online news is fast, current, and convenient, that users can link to relevant sites, that they can search multiple sources simultaneously to access multiple points of view, and that such sources contain more multimedia content. Emerging from this study were three types of users.

Convenience users are those who access news by default through push mechanisms (e.g. email, instant messenging); in Australia, such users were typically on the NineMSN platform. These are not people who had become disengaged from the news in recent times, but instead had never been particularly engaged at any point in the first place. They preferred breaking news and material that was flippant, light, glamourous, concise, or infotainment. Users in this group who were aged 18-24 are intelligently finding their own sources, and mainsteam news is simply not that important to them; they enjoy current affairs and satire. Users above 25 years were usually integrating their news with social networking.

Loyal users are those who use the online version of that news source which they also receive offline. They prefer ease of use, and the familiarity of the site brand is important to them. They scan home pages and click on those stories which are of interest to them; they are mainly aged over 25 years, and have a low propensity to interact with the news. Their content interests confirm their allegiance to the masthead. Users under 25 in this group were habitually judgmental and snobbish about the consumers of other (especially tabloid) news sources; users above 25 similarly valued reputation and reliability in the news brands they affiliate with.

Customisers, finally, are those users who cherry-pick content from the various multimedia formats and other content types available to them.They have a strong personal digital identity, and are highly interactive; they are more likely to be active produsers of content, too. Their interests are specialised, and they value opinion and citizen journalism as additional sources of news. Users below 25 in this group were highly aware and active explorers of information, and want useful, cheap, and convenient content. Users above 25 were typically time-poor, with an emphasis on filtering and specialised news. For them, cost seems to be less of an issue.

Digital news use is evolving quickly, then, and it is possible to identify key questions, and unmet gaps between desire and delivery. A segmentation of consumers into these categories may help understand them, and enables news organisations to develop strategies to encourage consumers to move from being convenience to being loyal users. Responding to such user communities' needs is likely to imprive these users' loyalty to a news organisation, of course.

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