For New Media Haters

More bad news: consumers want to know what they want to know, not what an editor decides is news. So writes Gina Chin on the Niemann Foundation blog. This is a nice quick overview of the Pew Center's latest survey on the impact of new media. (Please, when can we start just saying media again, or at least, digital media).

Chin's takeaway quote:
But the important point is that the loyalty isn’t to the platform, the application, the delivery system, or the brand. The loyalty is to the need for the information.

What they find is that certain platforms tend to have certain information. I'm a little befuddled by this point, that Twitter is the home for "tech" news. Have these people kept up with regular news lately? Twitter is pretty much the email distribution list of almost every college or pro sports team, and almost all the traditional media.

In reading over the Pew study's overview, I'd say that indeed, they didn't read sports. Perhaps this will take the Indiana school of journalism's sports media program to look into, but Pew gets a truly skewed concept of Twitter by ignoring sports. One of the points was that Twitter moves on from a story within a week, and there's a lack of continuing coverage.

Regardless, both scholarly sources point to the increasing importance of operating in the social media medium. You know, this Twitter thing might catch on.