Whilst I don't have a tablet device, I haven't bought a newspaper for many years (unless you class the Economist as a newspaper).  The demise of the printed press has been widely muted for some time, and circulation figures seem to support this claim.  Are mobile devices hastening this decline though?

It's estimated that around 2/3 of us use a mobile device regularly each day, with the consumption of news one of the most popular uses of these devices.  New research by the Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) investigates the impact of mobile usage on the media industry, and their findings will be pleasing to media moguls everywhere.

“The increased use of mobile devices does not yet appear to have accelerated the switch from print to digital news consumption as earlier surveys suggested,” says Roger Fidler, the program director for digital publishing at RJI. “Forty percent of mobile device users indicated in our survey that they still subscribe to printed newspapers and news magazines. This percentage was almost identical for non-users of mobile devices.”

The survey found that by far the most popular device for accessing news on the move was a tablet computer such as the iPad.  The survey divided mobile devices into four categories:

• large tablet devices
• small tablets
• e-readers
• smart phones

“Amazon and Apple have built quite a bit of brand loyalty from their customers,” Fidler says. “Forty-four percent of Apple iPhone owners also own large media tablets, 96 percent of which are iPads. This obviously poses a significant challenge for publishers and advertisers who are trying to circumvent Apple by focusing their attention on mobile devices with the Android operating system.

“These results suggest that to reach the highest percentage of smartphone and large media tablet owners, news organizations must make their content available on Apple iPhones and iPads.”

Do you use a mobile device to catch up on the news?