How Mobile Devices Offer Extended Access to News Consumers

At the Federal Trade Commission's two-day workshop on the "future of journalism" this week, Google's Hal Varian suggested that the emergence of mobile platforms creates an opportunity for news providers to "turn online news into a leisure time activity."

In other words, back to the future.

Think about it.

Before the Internet, people mainly read newspapers at their breakfast tables or on commute trains, not during work hours.

That changed with the coming of websites and the proliferation of news that characterizes our wired lifestyles today.

The 24/7 news cycle has what Varian terms both "good" and "bad" news for media companies. Online news now reaches people when and where they were previously inaccessible, but they don't necessarily have enough time to read it.

All of this should be considered in the context of that recent survey of Facebook users indicating that they share more content on weekends than on weekdays.

While the author of that survey, Dan Zarrella, speculates that his findings are partly due to the fact that 54 percent of U.S. employers block social media sites like Twitter and Facebook access for their employees at work, the spike in sharing on weekends still seems significant.

After all, that's when the overall volume of news content falls dramatically, another important indicator that Varian's suggestion about the "leisure-time" value of news may need to be re-visited by news providers as consumers become ever more mobile in their news-reading habits.

The Google exec cited data, for example, indicating that the typical reader only spends 70 seconds with online news while at work. Later on, however, people may return to the articles, study them in more depth, and perhaps, share them as well.

With smartphones and e-Readers in more and more pockets going forward, we can be sure that consumers' access to news and other content is steadily growing outside of the workplace. The question is whether news providers will adapt.

They probably will. When you think of it, back in the heyday of newspapers it was always the Sunday edition that was the fattest, both with content and with ads.