Foraging and opportunism : How Americans get their news and information

Tell a law firm leader that few, if any, of their recent associate hires subscribe to their major local newspaper or the Wall Street Journal. The leader would want to know who hired the dim wits who were going uninformed.

Tell a law firm communications director that they would be better served to have one of their lawyer’s blog posts shared on Twitter than to have the lawyer quoted in the New York Times. No way they’d buy it.

But law firms are going to come to understand that newspapers and other traditional main stream media are not the primary way many people receive their news today. News today is a shared experienced.

Based on their study this spring, the Pew Foundation Internet & American Life Project describes the manner in which Americans get their news and information as foraging and opportunism.

To a great extent, people’s experience of news, especially on the internet, is becoming a shared social experience as people swap links in emails, post news stories on their social networking site feeds, highlight news stories in their Tweets and haggle over the meaning of events in discussion threads. For instance, more than 8 in 10 online news consumers get or share links in emails.

Specific findings of the Pew study include:

• 50% of American news consumers say they rely to some degree on people around them to tell them the news they need to know.
• 75% of online news consumers say they get news forwarded through email or posts on social networking sites.
• 52% say they share links to news with others via those means.
• 51% of social networking site (e.g. Facebook) users who are also online news consumers say that on a typical day they get news items from people they follow.
• 23% of this cohort follow news organizations or individual journalists on social networking sites.

Rather than be scared by the perils of social media and shortsightedly limit access to social media in the workplace, you as law firm leaders ought to embrace this sharing of news and information. It’s to your firm’s benefit – and frankly, you have no other choice. The world is changing and we’re not headed back.