twopointouch

I’ve been tagged twice for this so here goes. I have also cheated and extended this out to two weeks…

Telly: watched Extras and Dr Who over Christmas. Neither of them were as good as I’d hoped. Otherwise, I watched The Most Annoying People of the Year on BBC 3 through iPlayer, which was quite possibly the bitchiest thing I’ve ever seen, in a good way. In other people’s houses I was subjected to seemingly dozens of TV talent shows and shouty soaps.

Books: Ludmila’s Broken English by DBC Pierre is an excellent read, though not quite up to the standard of Vernon God Little, IMHO. The book has two separate threads which are well-created but then brought together rather clumsily in the finale. Imperium - Robert Harris - his worst book to date, sadly, though still a good read for a train journey. For self-improvement, I managed to get through a few more chapters of Ackroyd’s London: The Biography, too. I’ve got his book about the Thames lined up once that’s finished, some time in 2009.

Papers: My normal diet is freesheets - the Metro and the London Shite. Staying at relatives’ houses meant a shock switch to The Torygraph and the Daily Mail. How do people find the time? And why do they bother? Also enjoyed my regular doses of Uncut, Private Eye and the Economist.

Online: I’ve been offline for most of the time over the last two weeks, which was a very good idea and means I’m keen to get stuck into those 300 unread feeds.

Games: do these count? Anyway, much of my break was spent with The Witcher, which I can thoroughly recommend to old-school CRPG fans. Also developed a crippling addiction to fab puzzler The Lost Treasures of Montezuma.

Reminiscent of this post, comes a reminder from LexisNexis that traditional media are much more highly trusted than any of us lot. However, it appears that the US is less trusting of its media - old and new - than the UK. Are we brits more gullible than the US, or is American media just a lot worse?

….Findings show that [in the US]:

Half of those surveyed said that they would turn to network television for immediate news information (NB: 66% in the UK)
The next most popular source was the radio (42%)
37% of consumers would use daily local newspapers
33% cable news or business networks
25% of those interviewed would rely on Internet sites of print and broadcast media
6% would turn to Internet user groups, blogs and chat rooms (24% in the UK)
On average, says the report, consumers are four to six times more likely to feel that traditional media is more trustworthy than emerging news sources for news they feel is most interesting.

….For entertainment, consumers most often picked traditional lifestyle media as the most trusted source. However, Internet blogs, user groups and chat rooms were selected next most often, followed by weekly or monthly general interest and news magazines.

….52% of the consumers surveyed anticipate they will continue to mostly trust and rely on traditional news sources. However, 35% expect they will trust and rely on both emerging news and traditional news in the future, and 13% anticipate they will trust and rely mostly on emerging media.

A report at FT.com sums up a recent survey by Jupiter Research. The amount of time devoted by Europeans to web use has, for the first time, overtaken the time they spend reading newspapers and magazines:

Print consumption has remained static at three hours a week in the past two years, as time spent online has doubled from two to four hours. Viewers are also spending more time watching television, up from 10 hours to 12 a week.

The adoption of broadband is shown to have a very positive effect on online consumption:

In France, where 79 per cent of online households have broadband connections, the typical user is online for five hours a week, compared with only three hours a week in Germany, which has a broadband penetration rate of 42 per cent.

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