NEW YORK (AP) – A new report on the state of the media has some simple terms for how we learn about the world: mobile and social media.
More visitors to Yahoo, NBC and other top Internet sites are getting their news from mobile devices than from desktop computers, according to “State of the News Media 2015,” published Wednesday by the Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project. Pew also found that nearly half of Web users learn about politics and government from Facebook, roughly the same percentage as those who seek the news through local television and double those who visit Yahoo or Google News.
“News is becoming more diverse in the ways that people connect with it,” said Amy Mitchell, director of journalism research at the Pew center. Mitchell added that finding “new ways of connecting with and challenging” the audience is increasingly important for news outlets.
It’s unclear whether the majority status of mobile users on Yahoo and elsewhere is new. Numerous studies in recent years have tracked the rise of hand-held devices, but Mitchell said that Pew did not have immediate information from previous years on the ratio between mobile and desktop users for online sites.
A trend toward mobile could be troubling for the future of longer stories, because the Pew report shows that people are more impatient on small screens than on desktops. On Yahoo, desktop readers in January 2015 averaged 3.9 minutes per visit, compared to 2.3 minutes for mobile. For NBC News Digital, the ratio is nearly 2 to 1, with 5.1 minutes for desktop and 2.6 minutes for mobile.