TV: THE 800-POUND GORILLA
New research sheds new light on TV news usage

In the competitive world of television news, it’s a given that stations need to know as much as possible about their viewers. But a groundbreaking study suggests that ratings and telephone surveys provide a less than complete picture of the audience and its viewing habits.

The Middletown Media Studies examined how people really use the media by comparing the results of telephone surveys to diaries and to direct observation of people both at home and away from home. Co-author Bob Papper of Ball State University says one conclusion is inescapable: “If you think you know about your audience by asking them on the phone, you know nothing.”

In almost every instance, people responding to telephone surveys underreported their media use, sometimes by a wide margin. “Phone research appears fully capable of determining whether people possess various technology, but even the simple task of determining whether they used a particular medium appears suspect,” the report says. In the case of television news, 32 percent of phone respondents said they watched the day before. But observers found more than 67 percent of people actually watched television news at some point during the day.

The study also found that people underestimated how much television news they watch, and by a wide margin. Observers found that people watched news an average of 97 minutes per day, three times as much as they estimated in phone interviews and diaries.

The research challenges some widely held beliefs about the news audience. Younger people don’t watch TV news? Not true, says Papper, whose study included viewers 18 and older. “A lot of young people watch, but they’re light viewers. They watch news, they just don’t watch it much.” Papper found that 57 percent of people 18-34 actually watched TV news, but only 41 percent told telephone interviewers they were news viewers. People are turning off TV news? Not so simple, says Papper. “They’re watching, just differently.”

Viewers in general are watching far more TV news in the mornings than in any other daypart, according to the research. Observers found viewers watched 37 minutes per day, on average, between 6 and 10 a.m., compared to 20 minutes per day between 7 p.m. and midnight. During the “news of record” broadcast time period viewers still watch less, on average, than in the mornings—23 minutes on average between 3 and 7 p.m.

One viewing difference that’s not picked up by traditional research methods is the amount of multitasking people engage in. Fully one quarter of the time people spend with media is spent with multiple media. “The notion that new technology displaces old technology is just wrong,” says Papper. “People are piling on, not substituting.”

While the researchers found that TV was “the 800-pound primary gorilla,” in that when people are watching television that’s the main thing they’re doing, there was a fair amount of multitasking going on. And observers found more people multitasking during news programs than entertainment. It was common for people to turn on the morning TV news and read a newspaper at the same time. And noticeably more people used the computer during newscasts as opposed to entertainment programs. “News programs send people to the Web, and they’re doing that successfully,” said Papper. “Maybe instead of noting that throughout the newscast, stations should think about doing it at the end.”

The study was conducted in 2003 in Muncie, Indiana—nicknamed “Middletown” by researchers Robert and Helen Lynd, who documented American culture there in the 1920s and 30s. The Ball State team says Muncie almost exactly mirrors current national trends in media use, making it an ideal laboratory for studying how people use the media.

The next phase of the study will look more closely at the content of the media that’s in use. Observers plan to collect data on channel switching, with an eye toward finding out when and why people hit the remote. Papper hopes to have results to report by the spring of 2005.