The Future Holds Less and More for the American News Audience

by David Tewksbury

I have been asked to speculate on the future of the news industry and to write from the perspective of research on the audience for online news. In doing that, I will temporarily disregard my ignorance of the business of news and what it tells us about the future (but see James Hamilton's essay in this roundtable). Rather, I will assume that the marketplace for news will nicely react to what people want from it. That is, I will assume for the moment that people will get what they want.

What do they want?

They short answer is that people have a pretty good idea of what they want from the process of news delivery and consumption. But, people do not always know what they want when it comes to news content. I will talk about each of these intertwined issues, delivery and content, in turn.

But first, I think we can agree that there are various straw figures I can use to represent the future of news. For the purposes of this essay I will consider the one that says we are headed toward total fragmentation of the news. According to a pure version of this future, people seek entirely personalized news flows. They are selective in the news they consume, and the media will give them the ability to be deeply focused on specialized news topics. As a result, consumers of specific news topics are separated from one another by the information they have and the beliefs they form. In this very brief essay, I will evaluate this total selectivity straw figure and decide how badly I can maul it.

A fundamental issue to consider regarding the future of news is how people will receive news and information. The straw figure says that is the heart of the question. I think it is only one part of it.

The signs today point ever more steadily to a future in which the technological boundaries between media are porous, perhaps even absent. I will accept that suggestion, ignoring for the moment my own love for the crinkle of a newspaper and the ability to think of my television as something that I can turn on and off. Rather, I think a realistic view of the future is one in which multiple technologies exist for the delivery of news, and the technology one uses at any one moment makes little difference to the flow and nature of content.

The research on news consumption motivations and patterns suggests that many forces influence what delivery technologies and news topics people want. One consistent finding is that some people at some times use the media, including the press, in a passive fashion. They do not want to be in control. They choose not to choose. Rather, they want the news brought to them. They want other people to decide what is important and to present it in a way that is simple and easy to consume. Other people, on the other hand, are much more purposive in their exposure. They want to maximize the efficiency of news consumption, and they want to select news for themselves.

This means that no one model for delivery will satisfy all of the audience. I remain deeply skeptical of predictions or plans for the future of media that call for people continually having to make choices. As we barrel along toward a system of on-demand entertainment and news, we will also see the need for systems of no-demand. These systems will look and act much as network television news producers of today. They will organize content for those who either do not know what sorts of news they prefer or who want to get a bit of everything.

In sum, I disagree with the total selectivity approach. I think it will work fine for some people and not at all well for others. If media systems are responsive to audience desires, then there will always be a place for what mainstream television news does today.

The second question to consider is whether we can identify the sorts of content people will want from the news. I think we can, if we again adopt both mass and specialized audience perspectives. As I just argued with respect to delivery, I think the news of the future will contain both approaches.

From a mass audience perspective, news audiences are not looking for public affairs content as often as some may wish. My own research in online news reading (Tewksbury, 2003) and survey results from the Pew Center for the People and the Press (2004) suggest that long-held skepticism about the American public's tastes may still be justified. In general, there is a larger audience for sports, entertainment, and spectacle in the news than there is for substantive international, national, and political coverage. News preferences are always sensitive to current events, but there are underlying preferences for infotainment that seem to be highly persistent over the long term (Althaus, 2002).

At the same time, research suggests that there are committed audiences of public affairs news, just like there are people devoted to sports, business, health, and the arts. These specialized news consumers currently provide nicely segmented audiences for niche advertisers, and that should ensure the continued availability of news that caters specifically to them. That catering will likely, as Hallin suggests in his essay in this issue, feature increasingly partisan content of the sort we see today online and in cable television.

So, in the aggregate, what do people want from the news? Everything. There are those who want a full range of news options and make their selections on the basis of the menu of the moment. For them, variety in content options is important. There are others who want one, two, three, or ten things, and they consistently want those topics. They are far less sensitive to changes in the external environment. The success of very specialized online Web logs ("blogs") attests to the attractiveness of focused, alternative treatments of familiar news topics.

I occasionally have this annoying feeling that our research with online news audiences and their desires is "discovering" what good journalists, editors, and producers have known all along. There is an audience for pretty much every type of news. Deciding what will be presented in the news hinges, in part, on how badly people want particular content and how much it is worth to them. To be sure, there are many pressures, normative and otherwise, acting on the press (Bennett, 1996; Hallin, in this issue). But, from a purely market-driven perspective, it is clear that both generalization and segmentation of content pay.

That is the future of the news, to my mind: There will likely be coexistence, probably very peaceful and synergistic, of both mass and segmented news delivery. This will happen within a technological infrastructure that allows people to be as passive or active in their selection of content as they want. What they choose will be the topics of today, but more of everything. There will be more entertaining, informative, and opinion-filled news. This diversity of content will meet with approval by some members of the audience. For the others, there will always be ways to filter, limit, and control. The questions that remain are who will be in control and whether the audience will care who it is.

David Tewksbury is an Associate Professor in the Department of Speech Communication, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.

REFERENCES

Althaus, S. L. (2002). American news consumption during times of national crisis. PS: Political Science & Politics, 35 , 517-521.

Bennett W. L. (1996). An introduction to journalism norms and representations of politics. Political Communication, 13(4), 373-384, 1996 Oct-Dec.

Pew Center for the People and the Press (2004). Public Attentiveness To News Stories: 1986 - 2004 . Accessed on December 14, 2005 from http://people-press.org/nii/.

Tewksbury, D. (2003). What do Americans really want to know? Tracking the behavior of news readers on the Internet. Journal of Communication, 53 , 694-710.