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'Media Multitasking' Revealed in Ball State Study

When it comes to communications, there's no better campus than Ball State University, 90 minutes away from Indianapolis in Muncie, Ind.

BSU proves it again today.

On the heels of studies identifying the trend toward media multi-tasking (my favorite is the study on teenage media multitasking by the Kaiser Family Foundation), Ball State takes a look at a nuts-and-bolts approach to an important question: How does concurrent media use affect advertising-supported media?

According Ball State's Jan. 27 news release, written by Marc Ransford of BSU media relations:

The typical consumer often uses more than one type of media at any given time, preferring to work on the computer while the radio plays or surf the Web as the television blares in the background, says new research by Ball State University. However, not all ad-supported media are multitasked, also known as concurrent media use (CME), in the same way or to the same extent, according to the university's latest white paper, "Engaging the Ad-Supported Media."

The new research produced by Ball State's Center for Media Design (CMD), compares and contrasts elements of media experiences for the major advertising-based media, including magazines, newspapers, television, radio and the Internet. The findings are based on data collected from about 400 people in Muncie and Indianapolis for 2005's Middletown Media Studies 2 (MMS2), producing information on more than 5,000 hours of media use.

"We know Americans spend about nine hours daily with radio, television, magazine, newspaper, computer and other media, but looking at media use solely in accumulated total minutes barely scratches the surface of how we use various media," said Michael Holmes, CMD faculty research fellow and communication studies professor.

"We dug deeper, looking at a variety of issues related to spending time with the media," he said. "Our findings for concurrent media exposure — what others call media multitasking — varied depending on the media, time of day, day of week and a person's location."

-- snip --

The white paper's principal researchers include several faculty from Ball State's College of Communication, Information, and Media, including Holmes, telecommunications professor Robert Papper and journalism professor Mark Popovich. Mike Bloxham, CMD's testing center director, is also a research team member. Findings from the research will be used to create a series of reports and white papers in the coming months.

More information about the free white paper and other CMD research is available at www.bsu.edu/cmd/insightresearch.

-- snip --

The Center for Media Design (CMD) is a research and development facility focused on the creation, testing and practical application of digital technologies for business, classroom, home and community.

Middletown Media Studies 2 (MMS2) builds upon Muncie's reputation as "Middletown America," a typical community in the United States. Muncie earned this distinction as a result of the Middletown Studies of the 1920s and '30s by sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd. MMS2 is a follow-up to a 2004 study that found people consume much more media than they say they do.

I'm not sure if this study definitively answers the advertising question. And I'm not sure of its implications for public relations and marketing. I think I'll read the report and find out!

Technorati Tags: "Center for Media Design" Middletown ad-supported advertising communications "Ball State" Muncie "concurrent media use" "media multi-tasking" advertising magazines radio television TV computer music

The Newsroom Mindset: Nose for News vs. Gotcha Journalism

I've been impressed lately with the blogs operated by one of my favorite American newspapers, the News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C. This post, and the post immediately before this one, both concern recent blog entries from editors of that newspaper.

A blog entry today by Melanie Sill, executive editor of the N&O, discusses the disconnect between the wider world's perception of what goes on in a newsroom and the reality of newsrooms day to day.

Perception (more in my view than Ms. Sills' view, to be fair): Bigtime newspaper journalists sit around all day trying to figure out how to "get" people in power. "Gotcha" journalism is the norm, not the exception.

Reality: In many city newsrooms, like Raleigh and like many cities and towns in Indiana, much attention is simply focused on this pursuit: finding the news. Even the friendliest of sources doesn't always drop word of the big news in town, and all of us -- as consumers of news, regardless of whether we are or advise makers of news -- pay good money to subscribe to a newspaper because we want to know what is going on in the world immediately around us, and even in the world that is distant from us.