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Smartphones have tiny screens. Do people who get their news from their smartphones have tiny attention spans? The Pew Research Center sought to gain insight into this question with an in-depth study of the length of time people spend reading news articles on their cellphones. The study also examined the routes readers take to get to news websites from their cellphones. "Social Media, Cellphones And Long-Form Journalism: What's Up With Facebook?" takes a look at what they found.
Newspapers and print magazines are an ideal format for long-form journalism. The world is rarely simple and long-form journalism allows the writer to bring the world to the reader in depth, complexity and detail. When it works as intended, the reader is better informed, holds more nuanced opinions, and can make more intelligent decisions.
The problem with long-form journalism in the digital world is that it’s . . . well, long. More and more readers get their news from mobile platforms with small screens that demand swipe, after swipe, after swipe to get through a long article. News on smartphones is often consumed in public environments where there are a lot of competing demands for attention. And there is the stereotype that people buried in their smartphones in public places have tiny minds to go along with their tiny screens and tiny attention spans. None of this bodes well for the future of long-form journalism.
Do cellphone readers spend more time with long-form articles?
Pew Research partnered with the Knight Foundation to examine how people interact with long- and short-form news stories on their cellphones. They acquired data from Parse.ly, a digital media analytics company, on 117 million cellphone interactions with 74,840 articles from 30 news websites that took place during September 2015.
Approximately 24% of the articles were long-form with the remaining 76% categorized as short-form. Long-form was defined as having 1,000 or more words. Nearly 97% of the long-form articles were between 1,000 and 4,900 words. The remaining 3% were 5,000 words or greater. Approximately 75% of the short-form articles were between 251 and 999 words; the rest were between 101 and 250 words. Articles of 100 words or less were eliminated from the analysis because they were often headlines, teasers for longer articles or photo captions.
The basic question Pew asked was whether cellphone users take the time to read long-form news stories. The obvious way to answer this question is to look at the average time readers spend with articles of different lengths. If the average times spent on long- and short-form articles are roughly equal, long-form journalism is likely to be faring poorly with cellphone readers.
Averaging may not be the best way to measure reading time, however, because the average or mean can be affected by interactions between readers and articles that distort the measure and make it inaccurate. For example, inaccurate short reading times may occur when a reader arrives at an article, realizes they made a mistake, and leaves immediately thereby producing an unrealistically short “reading” time for an article that was never read.
Inaccurate long reading times may occur when a reader is distracted, stops reading without leaving the web page or shutting down their cellphone, and doesn’t return for a long time. This is more likely to happen with long articles than short ones for the simple reason that the more time you spend with a news story, the more opportunity there is for a distraction to occur. If this happened, the reading times for long articles would be artificially inflated.
Pew took two steps to deal with these problems. First, they reduced the effect of fast times for unread articles by eliminating from the analysis all interactions with a news article that lasted less than five seconds. Second, they reduced the effect of artificially long reading times by measuring the central tendency for reading times using both the median and the mean. Pew found that both measures produced the same pattern of results for the data in their sample and so they used the average to report reading times.
Now we can answer the basic question. Do cellphone readers spend more time with long-form articles? Yes, they do. As can be seen in the graph, reading time increased as the number of words increased. In general, cellphone users gave more time to long-form articles (123 seconds, on average) than short-form articles (57 seconds).
Do cellphone readers bother to read long-form articles at all?
Pew’s analysis thus far tells us that cellphone readers spend more time with long-form articles . . . when they read them. This is good but it doesn’t mean much for the future of long-form journalism on cellphones if readers tend to avoid reading long articles because they’re too long. Pew examined this issue by looking at how often long- and short-form articles were read.
Reading on cellphones often takes place in environments that produce interruptions. This raises the possibility that the number of times a long-form article is read might be artificially inflated. Longer reading times means more opportunities to be interrupted. If a reader is interrupted, she may return to the article at a later time with the result that one complete reading is counted as two different reads. To avoid this problem, separate interactions with an article that took place over a period of time were collapsed into what Pew called a “complete interaction”. This guarantees that reading an article only counts as one reading no matter how many times you had to come back to the article to finish it.
Pew found that long- and short-form articles were read at almost identical rates when the counts are based on complete interactions. Short articles were read much more often than long because there were more than three times as many short-form articles to read in the sample. However, the average number of complete interactions was 1530 for each long-form article and 1576 for each short form article. Put another way, 24% of the articles in the sample were long form and 24% of the articles in the sample that were read were also long form. Cellphone readers are not avoiding long-form news articles.
This is good news for everyone except those who are adamantly committed to the stereotype that cellphone readers are shallow, attention challenged magpies looking for the next shiny. Writers (like me) for websites (like Forbes) are free to explore topics (like long-form journalism) in detail (like this article). Editors can be confident that readers will give their time to the long-form articles the website publishes. Website owners don’t have to worry that long-form articles will hurt their bottom line. Most important of all, readers (like you) with a desire to know more will not lose access to a type of information that has the potential to inform in ways that are simply not possible with limited word counts.
The study conducted by Pew Research also examined the routes readers took to get to news websites from their cellphones. "Social Media, Cellphones And Long-Form Journalism: What's Up With Facebook?" takes a look at what they found.
