Americans spend more time with media than anything else in their lives, according to Ball State's Bob Papper. Newspapers are facing real issues.

As the word processor loads, an employee begins checking her overflowing inbox. She clicks through the e-mails, pausing only to answer the incessantly ringing phone. At home, her high school-age daughter does her homework in front of her favorite television program.

“The computer has taught us how to do two or more things at the same time, and we’ve learned well,” said Bob Papper, professor of Telecommunications at Ball State. Papper, a self-proclaimed “news junkie,” spoke to the audience at the Kent State MediaMindsets conference about his Middletown Media Studies project. The researchers looked at how people interact with media, something Papper said had rarely been studied before. “We spend more time with the media than most anything in our lives,” he said.

Ball State's Bob Papper talks about how families use media. He spoke to the KSU MediaMindsets conference on how audiences are changing, or disappearing.

The group documented the media use of 396 individuals from Muncie and Indianapolis, Ind., observing their habits in daily or weekly diaries from the minute they woke up until participants “threw us out” before bed, Papper said, laughing.

“If they went shopping, we went shopping,” he said. “If they went to school, we went to school.”

The results of the study surprised him. The average person spent nine hours a day with the media, more time than most spent sleeping.

Individuals often used more than one kind of media at a time, multitasking on the phone and computer or using the TV or radio to fill the silence.

“We insist on a background to life,” Papper said.

Don’t be too sure

People may not realize how much media they were using, because it often serves as background noise. After observing each individual, researchers called and asked questions about his or her media usage on the day they studied.

“There are staggering differences between what people say they do, and what people do,” he said.

Participants may also under- or over-report their media use, depending on what

Kent JMC professors Fred Endres (left) and Gary Hanson (right) talk with Bob Papper.

they think researchers wanted to hear, Papper said. This could account for the 26 percent of people who said they read a newspaper but did not. Despite the disparities, people are still turning to newspapers, especially for local

news. Most get their news from area television stations, followed by their local newspapers, rather than the Internet or cable news.

“That doesn’t mean that everything is fine, but it does mean you have more time to make changes,” Papper told audience of media professionals and academics.

Papper said he sees media moving toward a niche market and away from the mass market. He also thinks there will be less distinction between news, information and the various mediums in the future.

“It comes down to the old question,” he said. “Are you in the railroad business or the transportation business? Are you producing ink on dead trees, or are you in the information business?

“Because if you’re in the information business, you have a good future.”

--Story by Rachel Abbey

--Photographs by Gavin Jackson and Michael Chritton

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