Pew study: Mobile news consumers have "voracious" appetite

Wireless Internet access is reshaping how consumers access news, according to a new report from The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.
The report found that 37% of American adults with a cellphone use their device to access the Internet, with one-third of the nation’s total cellphone users accessing some form of news wirelessly. Weather (26%) was the most often accessed piece of information from a mobile device, followed by news and current events (25%), the downloading of a news applications (18%), sports scores or stories (16%), traffic information (13%), financial information (12%), and news via e-mails or text messages (11%).
“Wireless news consumers have fitted this ‘on-the-go’ access to news into their already voracious news-gathering habits,” the Pew study noted. “They use multiple news media platforms on a typical day, forage widely on news topics and browse the Web for a host of subjects.”
The Pew report also noted that this “on-the-go” group is also a “voracious” consumer of online news and information. More than half of this group (55%) access news information from at least four different platforms per day, with one-fourth accessing at least six different platforms for their news. And while they can’t get enough of mobile access, the study also found that this group was 50% more likely to read a print version of a national newspaper, with the only platform they were less likely to use than other adults was their local television news.
Who are these people?
The survey found that the typical consumer accessing news from a mobile device is a white male, age 34 who has graduated from college and has full-time employment. The survey added that 40% of these mobile consumers have young children, 32% have never been married and 32% live in a household with an annual income of at least $75,000. These consumers are also 67% more likely than other cellphone users to send text messages, more than twice as likely to take a photo with their mobile device and four times more likely to instant message from their cellphone.
The Pew study also noted that these consumers are heavily connected with 80% of them accessing the Internet either from a mobile or fixed-line device every day compared with 67% of other Internet users, and they are more likely to blog (20% vs. 11%), use social network sites (73% vs. 48%) and use “status update” sites like Twitter (29% s. 14%).