About 24 percent of teens who go online were using Twitter at the end of 2012, marking a dramatic increase from the 16 percent who were on Twitter in 2011. The new findings on teen social media use and attitudes toward online privacy come from a new report from the Pew Research Center, “Teens, Social Media and Privacy,” that’s set to release on Tuesday. Here’s how things changed in just a year:

Apart from the raw numbers, Pew conducted focus groups with teens across the country to get feedback on how they use different sites. Here are the five most important trends you should know about teens and social media:

1. Teens are outpacing the grown-ups on Twitter

The rise in Twitter use among teens is particularly interesting since adult adoption hovers around 16 percent, according to the latest Pew report on adult social media use. Numbers among online teens are even stronger for African-Americans, 39 percent of whom are on the service (compared to 23 percent of white teens). Teens have shown a remarkable adoption of the service since 2009, when Pew first asked about the site, when only 9 percent reported using it.

2. Public is the new private on Twitter

The majority of teen Facebook users have their accounts set to private, but not so on Twitter. Some 64 percent of teens have Twitter accounts set to public so anyone can read their tweets, with 24 percent setting their accounts to private. Perhaps of most concern, 12 percent reported they didn’t know whether their tweets were public or private.

3. Teens are tired of Facebook, but they’re still using it

The media has been reporting teens abandoning Facebook for years now, but the Pew report finds that like a lot of adults, teens are frusterated by Facebook but stay on the platform because of the integral social role it still plays. The report explains: They dislike the increasing number of adults on the site, get annoyed when their Facebook friends share inane details, and are drained by the “drama” that they say is portrayed frequently on the site. The stress of needing to manage their reputation on Facebook also contributes to the lack of enthusiasm.” Yet 94 percent of them still use the site.

4. Tumblr numbers still aren’t very high

Yahoo might have liked the younger audience on Tumblr when it decided to acquire the site, but teen use of Tumblr is still pretty low. Only five percent reported using the site in 2012, although that’s up from 2 percent in 2011, a decent jump.

5. The subtweet goes mainstream

You heard it here first: 58 percent of teens are making inside inside jokes or sharing “cloaked messages” on social media.

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The Pew report highlights changes in social media over the first four years of Barack Obama’s presidency, showing how people are more likely to post to sites like Twitter and Facebook. However, these dramatic increases aren’t all that surprising. Twitter was barely a mainstream source for news in 2008, and Facebook wasn’t much older at that point. Now both sites have become much more accepted as major advertising and communications platforms, so the increased participation there makes sense.

However, it’s worth noting how people use these platforms around civic engagement, because these types of participation could impact the business models of companies like Twitter and Facebook as they grow. It’s also worth considering how social participation corresponds with income and education levels, and how it translates into life offline.

Here were some of the most interesting stats from the report, titled “Civic Engagement in the Digital Age,” which will become available on Pew’s site later Wednesday (Update: it’s now available on the site here.):

• Increased activity: More Americans used social networks for political activity (39 percent of all adults) in the 2012 race than used social media at all in 2008 (only 26 percent were using social media at the time.)
• Offline engagement: Those 39 percent of people who are politically active on social networks aren’t just limiting their activity to Facebook — they’re also really engaged offline as well. Sixty-three percent of the people who post political activity online then do something like attending a meeting in person, compared to the national average of 48 percent of people who take offline political action. They’re also more likely to contact their representative online than the average public.
• What they’re posting: In 2012, 17 percent of adults posted political stories to social media (up from 3 percent in 2008), and 12 percent friended or followed a candidate in 2012 (up from 3 percent in 2008.) Since more candidates now have active social accounts, this makes sense.
• Sparking an interest: It’s encouraging to note that 43 percent of people using social media said they were inspired to go learn more about something they saw on these channels. What exactly they went on to learn and where they learned it is not noted, but it does show that a Facebook post could spark greater civic interest.
• Demographics: Wealthy, better-educated individuals are more likely to become politically engaged both online and offline, although the disparity of participation between low-income and high-income groups was less pronounced on social media than in other capacities. However, the researchers said it doesn’t look like social media will be the political equalizer people thought it might be.
• The remaining power of offline: Americans are still three times more likely to discuss politics offline (in person or over the phone) than they are online, reminding users that political discourse hasn’t moved entirely to Facebook. And the same is true for political donations, 60 percent of which took place offline.

The Pew report was conducted in July and August of 2012 and interviewed 2,253 adults over the age of 18. The interviews took place on both landline phones and cell phones and in English and Spanish. The study’s margin of error is plus or minus 2.4 percentage points.

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The findings, conducted by the Pew Research Center and the Economist Group, were presented Monday at an advertising week event in New York. They showed that news was the second most popular activity after email on smartphones and tablets, and that people who used both types of devices were likely to consume more overall news than before.

In practice, this means that publishers are adapting to what Denise Warren of the New York Times calls the “multi-platform news user.” Warren says this user is likely to read the Times on a tablet in the morning and in the evenings, and to use their phone as an “interstitial” news device during the day.

Warren added that these trends have led the company to increase its engineering team by 40% in an effort to produce an optimal mobile experience for roving news consumers. Warren also said that subscribers’ expectation to read their news everywhere has led the Time to for the first time put their content on an external platform, Flipboard.

While the Pew findings are encouraging for news consumption, the revenue findings are less rosy. The study said only 6% of tablet owners had paid for news this year compared to 14% in 2011. The news is slightly better if bundled subscriptions are considered. Here’s a look at how smartphone and tablet owners pay for news (full results of the study here) :

(Image by Maxx-Studio)

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Big data can do a lot for us, not all of it good. As the Internet of things comes online, technology can help us save energy, cure diseases and predict trends. But there is also worry that big data will be disproportionately controlled and used by governments and big corporations to the detriment of citizens, according to a new Pew Research Center report called The Future of Big Data.

“While enthusiasts see great potential for using big data, privacy advocates are worried as more and more data is collected about people — both as they knowingly disclose things … in postings through social media and as they unknowingly share digital details about themselves as they march through life,” according to the report, released Friday.

The researchers asked which of two scenarios is more likely. The first is one in which big data converges in a largely positive way that means

human and machine analysis of large data sets will improve social, political, and economic intelligence by 2020. [It will] facilitate things like ‘nowcasting’ or real-time forecasting of events, the development of ‘inferential software’ that  assesses data patterns to project outcomes and the creation of algorithms for advanced correlations that enable new understanding of the world.”

Conversely, the other scenario posits that big data will

cause more problems than it solves by 2020. The existence of huge data sets for analysis will engender false confidence in our predictive powers and will lead many to make significant and hurtful mistakes. Moreover, misused by powerful people and institutions with selfish agendas who manipulate findings to make the case for what they want.

And the result was … pretty close. Fifty-three percent of those responding felt the first scenario was more likely; 39 percent went for the second option.

A sampling of responses:

Bryan Trogdon, a user-experience professional said:

The companies, government and organizations that are able to mine this resource will have an enormous advantage over those that don’t. With speed, agility and innovation determining the winners and losers, big data allows us to move from a mindset of ‘measure twice, cut once’ to one of ‘place small bets fast.

Brian Harvey, lecturer at the University of California-Berkeley wrote:

The collection of  information is going to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor. I suppose that for a few people that counts as a positive outcome, but your two choices should have been ‘will mostly benefit the rich’ or “will mostly benefit the poor rather than ‘good for society’ and ‘bad for society.’

Skimming this report, I can only think about the latest banking scandal in which bankers allegedly colluded to set LIBOR interest rates to suit their own ends. The concentration of big data and analytics capabilities in the hands of industry giants can be a frightening prospect.

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project working with Elon University surveyed  1,021 Internet experts and users recruited by email.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Kevin Krejci

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The Pew Research Center has come out with a massive new report on the state of media as part of its Project for Excellence in Journalism, and it comes to a number of conclusions about where the industry stands — including the fact that Twitter and Facebook are still driving a fairly small amount of traffic to media outlets (although this segment is growing quickly) and that tech giants like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft control almost 70 percent of online advertising. But one other thing that becomes clear from the Pew report is just how big a role aggregators of all kinds — both human and machine-powered — are playing in news consumption.

Despite the growing evidence to the contrary, many newspaper companies and other traditional media outlets still seem to think the vast majority of their audience comes to them directly and prefers to read their content above all other sources. More than anything else, this is the core philosophy behind the rise of paywalls — which more and more papers are implementing — and also the millions of dollars that media companies have poured into developing iPad apps and other walled-garden-style approaches to news delivery. The assumption is that readers will want only the content that comes from that specific outlet.

Aggregation is a way of life for more news consumers

For many consumers, however, aggregators of various kinds are the way they consume their news now, whether through Web-based portals like Yahoo News or Google News or through a variety of newer aggregation-based apps and services — apps such as Flipboard, Pulse or Zite for the iPad, as well as services like News.me, Summify (which was recently acquired by Twitter) and Percolate. According to the Pew report, close to 30 percent of consumers get their news from a “news organizing website or app,” compared with the 36 percent who go directly to a media company’s website or app:

In effect, many users seem to be looking to generate their own digital-newspaper-style overview of the world rather than accepting one from a single media outlet, and if the content they are looking for comes from an aggregator like the Huffington Post because the original is behind a paywall, then so be it. The problem for media companies is that this kind of behavior is in direct conflict with most of the business models they are relying on for revenue, whether it’s advertising or app- and paywall-based subscription services — which is why media moguls like News Corp. owner Rupert Murdoch continually accuse Google of “piracy.”

And the problem is actually even bigger than that, since the Huffington Post and Google News are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to aggregation and/or curation. Although Facebook and Twitter may not be huge factors in terms of news consumption at the moment — as my colleague Staci has pointed out at paidContent — with only 9 percent of users saying they get their news from those networks, that figure has grown by almost 60 percent in the past year alone, and it is likely continuing to increase.

Social sharing is both an opportunity and a danger

To some extent, that curation phenomenon is helping mainstream news organizations, because people are sharing links that get clicked on and drive traffic back to news outlets. This is especially the case with Twitter, since the Pew report notes that a larger proportion of users follow official media sources there, while a majority of Facebook users get their news from friends and family members. But just as with aggregation apps and services, the content that any single media company produces just becomes part of the sea of content that is distributed through these networks.

On top of that, Facebook itself is becoming much more of an aggregator of news, through the “social reading” apps it offers from outlets like the Washington Post and the Guardian. Although both newspapers have bragged about the number of people who have registered for their apps and shared content through them, the reality is that much of the benefit from that activity ultimately goes to Facebook — in terms of the time users spend on the site, the advertising they are exposed to, etc. — rather than to the news outlet.

Emily Bell, the former Guardian digital editor who now runs the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, noted in a response to the Pew report on Twitter that social platforms like Facebook are becoming “frenemies” for media companies, since they generate traffic but also suck up much of the benefit in terms of advertising:

Social platforms, esp Facebook looknews industry ‘frenemies’ – providing traffic while eating advertising bit.ly/xGdmpm (Pew)

— emily bell (@emilybell) March 19, 2012

What does all of this mean for media companies? More than anything, it means that trying to recreate the scarcity of content that used to exist in print — when media outlets controlled not only the creation of news but the platforms through which it was distributed — by using paywalls and subscription apps is fundamentally a losing battle. Many users want that content to be part of a larger digital experience, whether it’s through an aggregation app like Flipboard or through Facebook or Twitter. If your content is not designed to take advantage of that, you will be missing a larger and larger proportion of the audience you need.

One response to that is to shrink your audience down to those who will pay, as some outlets like the Financial Times have done and several of Rupert Murdoch’s British papers are trying to do. The other approach is to be as open and distributed as possible, to try to take advantage of the democracy of distribution instead of fighting it, and then to find other ways to monetize that audience and their attention, whether it’s e-books or live events or the “reverse paywall” model Jeff Jarvis and others have proposed. Either way, aggregation and curation are the new reality of media, whether media companies like it or not.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Denise Chan and See-ming Lee

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The Project for Excellence in Journalism at the Pew Research Center has come out with a substantial new report on the efforts of newspapers both large and small to grow their digital businesses, and — not surprisingly, perhaps — the results are all over the map. Although on average the news is rather bleak, with more than $7 in print revenue lost for every $1 produced by digital, some papers have managed to generate some strong growth, while others have lost revenue on their digital operations. And if there is one thing that comes through loud and clear when it comes to explaining this discrepancy, it is that culture matters more than anything.

The Pew report notes that the study involved 38 newspapers of various sizes belonging to six different chains, and was based on detailed internal data on revenue and other criteria, as well as in-depth interviews with executives and managers from more than a dozen of the papers surveyed. The research center said that, of the newspapers it looked at, seven had suffered declines in digital revenue over the previous year — in one case, a decline of more than 35 percent — while two other papers saw increases of 50 percent and 60 percent in their digital ad revenues (the newspaper that saw 60 percent growth also boosted its print ad revenue by 8 percent). As the report put it:

These variances suggest that the future of newspapers, rather than being determined entirely by sweeping trends, can be significantly affected by company culture and management — even at papers of quite different sizes.

A culture of inertia, and a lack of appetite for risk

And what is this cultural problem? According to Pew, several of the senior managers who were interviewed described a culture of “inertia” that made change difficult to achieve within the paper, and another executive said bluntly that “there’s no doubt we’re going out of business right now.” According to this executive, no one wanted to take the risk of trying to change or innovate because of a fear that they would not succeed — and then their company would fail anyway, and they would be blamed for it. “There might be a 90-percent chance you’ll accelerate the decline if you gamble and a 10-percent chance you might find the new model,” this executive said, and “no one is willing to take that chance.”

My paidContent colleague Staci Kramer is right that this particular Pew study left out some information that might be worthwhile in looking at newspapers and their revenue-generating abilities — such as any data on paywalls, which more and more papers seem to be implementing in an attempt to boost their bottom lines. But on the cultural issue, the results of the survey definitely ring true, at least based on my experiences in the newspaper business over the past couple of decades. It’s also the reason why some media veterans say they have given up on newspapers.

That sense of inertia and the fear of failure are two of the biggest stumbling blocks holding some newspaper chains back from disrupting their own businesses instead of standing by and watching while others disrupt them. This is what media consultant Anil Dash of Expert Labs and Activate Media means when he says that more media companies need to “think like startups.” Startups have no legacy business to disrupt, so they don’t have to worry about the impact on their bottom line (since most don’t have one of those either), and the best are not afraid of failure. If anything, they seek it out, so they can learn from it.

Put the digital types in charge, and start stacking those dimes

This is also why one of the single biggest efforts at disrupting the traditional newspaper business from inside has come from Journal-Register Co. under former CEO John Paton, after he took over management of the company in 2010. The previous version of the company went bankrupt and effectively ceased to exist — so Paton had a virtual blank slate when it came to trying new ideas, and likely a somewhat desperate board and investors as well. So the CEO promoted an aggressive “digital first” approach that involved outsourcing whatever possible in order to cut costs, and “stacking the digital dimes” in order to make up for print revenue losses (something Paton says is starting to pay off).

It’s no coincidence that in a number of presentations about his approach, Paton — who has since become CEO of the Media News Group newspaper chain — talks about the issues that newspapers have with their cultures, and how in his view one of the biggest changes that most traditional papers have to take is to “put the digital types in charge of everything.” This is likely not a comfortable message for many news executives to hear, but it comes closer to a solution than the road taken by many, which is to put newspaper managers in charge of digital. In a lot of cases, this is like putting the chickens in charge of managing the fox.

It’s refreshing to see some newspapers experiment with their own disruption, as the Washington Post has via projects such as its news-recommendation engine Trove and its Facebook social-reading app. The paper also just hired Rob Malda — better known as Commander Taco, the founder of pioneering online community Slashdot — as chief strategist for its internal WaPo Labs unit. But for too many newspapers, disrupting their own culture is something that just doesn’t come naturally, and that could literally mean the difference between life and death.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Tony Margiocchi and Kevin Lim.

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Is the Internet a positive force in your life or a negative one? Most of the technology experts, researchers and commentators surveyed in a recent study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project said that it was positive, and that they believe it will continue to be so. A total of 85 percent of those surveyed by the Center agreed with the statement: “In 2020, when I look at the big picture and consider my personal friendships, marriage and other relationships, I see that the Internet has mostly been a positive force on my social world. And this will only grow more true in the future.”

The Pew Center, along with Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center, asked 895 people from the technology industry — including opinion leaders such as media analyst Clay Shirky, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, author Nick Carr, futurist Esther Dyson and Google chief economist Hal Varian — to choose between two statements. One asked them to look back from 2020 and state that the Internet had been a positive force in their lives, and one that said the opposite. The survey was posted online, and drew from a list that the Pew Research Center maintains of technology observers.

As Om has pointed out in the past, the Pew Center’s reports are often somewhat obvious in their conclusions. It certainly isn’t surprising to see that people such as Craig Newmark and Clay Shirky — both of whom are deeply involved in the social elements of the Internet — view it as a positive force in their lives. It would be interesting to contrast the Pew study with one that sampled average Internet users about their lives in a post-Facebook, post-Twitter world. Given the highly publicized issues that Facebook and Google have had with privacy and other concerns over the past year, would more people say that the Internet has made their lives worse instead of better?

The reality, of course, is that the Internet is here to stay whether we like it or not, and is becoming more a part of our lives every day. And the growth of Facebook, with almost 500 million users, and Twitter with more than 65 million messages posted a day, is a tangible sign that these services are filling a very real need for many people. Are those and other social-media tools or social-networking services a positive thing in your life or a negative one? Take our poll, or let us know in the comments.

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user See-ming Lee