Changing News Consumption Habits
Jinfo Blog

By Amit Kothari

Abstract

Amit Kothari discusses how to leverage news sources for business advantage and how to ensure news consumption is recognised as a high-level process.

Item

News consumption habits, devices and methods have changed substantially. What we used to know as "consumption" of news has evolved rapidly. The real value is now in interactivity, curation, sharing and actionable steps that result from news.

News Makes You Agile, Informed and Competitive

News can be generated both internally and externally. Where it's syndicated externally, this often represents a cost centre that's a substantial overhead to your business. Given such costs, it's even more important to understand, map and implement the right methods of taking and tracking actions from news content.

Get the Basics Right

The first and most important aspect to get right is the raw news feeds. They need to be in a clean, vendor-agnostic format that allows you to re-purpose and re-format content.

The second aspect is to ensure that you have the right news channels at the core, with fringe channels that are specific to people, departments or teams.

A self-selection process by your colleagues for the right content is a much better approach than trying to mandate sources that may or may not be valuable to individuals and teams.

A different stream from internal news sources is now internal communication channels, social networking tools and collaboration platforms. These also require self-selection as channels for consumption by users, in standard formats such as RSS.

News is Lost Without Clear, Trackable Actions

The next stage to tackle is the ability to action and track reactions and behaviours that result from news content. The reading platform/surface for news must have clear actions that encourage proper curation, targeting and archival of news into collections.

The danger of getting this wrong is that everyone goes back to sharing links by email - and all forms of curation, syndication, channels and archival are lost. Consider how curation, leading to actionable steps, would be much more effective than just "sharing" news items to people, topics or channels.

Treat News as a High-Level Process that Everyone Knows

Instead of reading news as a fringe activity, treat it as a high-level process endorsed by executives and management. Make adding news to the agenda by specific, accountable individuals a well-known process within your organisation. This chain of action will allow your organisation to respond and excel from current awareness.

As a side effect of mastering "actionability" and "tracking" news, you may also find that your business becomes a leader in other ways. You may become a subject matter expert or authority that is regularly asked to add commentary to certain types of news. This adds immense value that stretches from inside your company into a competitive advantage outside your company.

Find Out More

If you're interested in ensuring you have an environment where you can act decisively on news that affects your reputation, knowledge base and competitive, then my Subscription Article "Organising and Delivering Practical Actions from News Content" will provide you with the background to tackle news dissemination, consumption, action and archival. 

This Blog Item is part of the FreePint Topic Series: News, and Beyond.

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