Peering into the audience

We’re closing in on 300 respondents to the redesign survey, so it’s time to sort through some of what we’re learning from the responses. I’ll save the narrative likes and dislikes for another day, and concentrate in this post on what the results tell us about the NewsCenter audience.

First, our audience tilts heavily toward UC Berkeley staff (50% of respondents). Alumni and, surprisingly, students were the next largest groups, both at around 14%, followed by faculty, retirees and parents, each in the 5% range. Of course, we can’t know for sure that these numbers match our readership, only the part of our readership with interest and time to fill out a survey. Still, it’s clear that determining and meeting the needs of campus staffers should play a significant role in the new design of the NewsCenter.

Ages were more evenly divided, with a bit more than half in their 40s and 50s, nearly a third in their 20s and 30s, and 11% at 60 or beyond.

Computers are nearly universal (99%) among our news readers, with smart phones trailing a distant second at 20%; no other news-reading device cracked the 5% barrier. This echoes the results of our ongoing website analytics, which show only a tiny fraction of our readers using anything smaller than a computer screen. However, it’s also a statistic we’ll keep an eye on as small mobile devices proliferate.

Finally, as probably befits an online survey, the web was the primary campus news source for nearly 4 out of 5 readers (see table at right). Email was the second strongest news channel (especially among older readers), closely followed by friends and co-workers. Social network posts fared surprisingly poorly as news sources; even among teens and 20-somethings, they were relied on occasionally at best. Then there were the traditional mass media, where print fared better than broadcast. Younger respondents especially shunned radio and TV news, while those who often or occasionally relied on newspapers were spread more evenly across the age spectrum.

More in my next post about news reading habits.

April 21 footnote: While the full survey found staff to be by far our biggest audience component, the single-question quick polls that have run on the NewsCenter for the past month had a much higher proportion of alumni responses (27% alumni, 28% staff). It’s impossible to know if this represented an actual shift of audience over the two surveying periods, or if alumni are simply more inclined to fill out an instant-response poll than a multi-question survey. It’s also worth noting that the quick polls had a smaller sample size, topping out at around 100 responses, versus 300+ for the full survey.