When We’re Multitasking Our Media, Print Wins Out

Radio dominates media use in the car, TV rules at home and computer use is common both at work and home.
No surprises there. But Ball State University researchers are out with a new paper on media “multitasking,” or what’s called concurrent use; and they say not all ad-supported media are multitasked in the same way or to the same extent.
The findings, they believe, are “good news for magazines and other print media” because unlike other media, “print is able to keep a person’s primary attention no matter the background noise.”
Meanwhile, “Radio maintained its reputation as a classic background medium, with participants listening as an exclusive activity only 24 percent of the time,” the researchers found.
More findings: Magazines are the medium with the largest proportion of time used at “other” locations; most people read newspapers in the morning; TV dominates as a news source in the early morning; up to 70 percent of participants watch television in the evenings; magazines show heavier readership on Mondays and Fridays, while newspaper readership peaks on Sundays and television exposure is lowest on the weekends; and almost half of all magazine exposure is experienced with television in the background, while television is the highest-ranked partner for newspapers by average minutes.
The study found that when using more than one medium at once, consumers paid significant attention to magazines. Newspapers ranked a distant second, but held a substantial lead in attracting attention relative to the Internet, radio or television when more than one medium was used.