Shakeup in the News Category
Jinfo Blog

By Robin Neidorf

Abstract

Preliminary research results from FreePint's 8th Annual Survey on News Needs and Preferences make interesting reading -  how many are changing supplier, spend levels, and how important is in-depth research to your users?

Item

We've begun gathering data for the 8th Annual FreePint Survey on News Needs and Preferences, and I'm not surprised to see a lot of shakeup reported by early respondents. You can participate in the survey, through 27th November. (Copy of the full report to all participants if they provide an email address at the end.)

Early Results Say...

Over 40% report that they've changed their primary news supplier in the past 3 years, and another 45% report reducing their spending in this category.

At the same time, 27% increased spend in the same period, so the trend is not entirely one-way.

Figure 1: Early results of FreePint's 8th Annual Survey on News Needs and Preferences - how has your licensing of news databases changed over the last 3 years?

This year's survey, part of the Topic Series "News, and Other Commodities", focuses on the tricky area of understanding and meeting the need for "current awareness" within an organisation.

We ask respondents to indicate which of several types of users have access to news databases, and then how those user groups value "in-depth research in a news database" and access to current awareness.

Groups include:

• Information centre staff or equivalent
• Researchers anywhere in the business
• Other knowledge workers with full access
• Other knowledge workers with read-only access
• Other "power users".

Averaging the resulting ratings from 1 (not important) to 4 (very important) for each of these groups results in the graph shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Early results of FreePint's 8th Annual Survey on News Needs and Preferences - importance of in-depth research in a news database

For every group other than information centre staff, interest in current awareness outstrips interest in in-depth research. Even the "power users" group, a self-selecting faction that might reasonably be interested in more in-depth research, is far more interested in current awareness.

This is still early data, and the findings could well change as we gather more. But at first glance, these results support our growing sense that comprehensive in-depth news databases may become a niche interest rather than the enterprise-wide requirement they were ten or even five years ago.

I encourage you to take 15 minutes now and complete the survey - providing your email at the end enables us to send you a copy of the full results upon publication in December.

« Blog