How to tailor news for 4 different platforms? 'Responsive design'

Versión en español aquí.

The Poynter Institute held a conference last week to showcase its latest study of how tablet users consume news and the problems designers have in satisfying these users' demands.

Tablets are rapidly becoming a platform of choice, with 22 percent of U.S. adults owning one, double the percentage of just a year ago, according to a Pew study.

Economy-minded publishers are trying to find ways to "publish the content once and have it adapt to all platforms"-- mobile, tablet, online and print -- Sam Kirkland writes.

Tech, intermediaries leave newspapers far behind

I came away from reading the State of the News Media in 2011 with the sense that newspapers in particular are being left farther behind by all of the advances in technology and payment systems.

One example is Apple. Although it is selling subscriptions to publications on its iTunes platform, it is taking 30% of the revenue and keeping the all-important customer data and credit card information to itself.

Web users are lazy, selfish and ruthless

(Versión en español aquí.)


Somebody brilliant said that, and if we need any proof we need look no further than a study by Comscore and the Newspaper Association of America.

The data show that the 108 million unique users of newspaper sites in June 2011 spent an average of just over a minute a day, 32 minutes a month, viewing their contents. (Updated July 2011.)

In a separate study, Facebook users were shown to be spending 14 times more time on that social networking site, or a total of 7 hours a month.

It´s one reason why newspapers are trying to make their contents part of that social web with strategies such as hiring community managers.