Twitter and Facebook are my primary sources of news, followed slightly slowly thereafter by online news sites. Last and, certainly, least it's my morning "News" paper.
As communication vehicles change, our use of them changes too. I followed the London Riots coverage last year on Twitter. It was at least a couple of hours ahead of the BBC in their "on the ground" coverage and the "eye witness" reports were breathtakingly real. I recall one gentleman updating regularly on the incident that was unfolding just several feet away from his home and the fear and urgency in his 140 character tweets was palpable.
I didn't need to read about it in the newspaper the next day. I felt like I'd already been there and experienced them first hand.
Facebook is great for picking up feature stories that you might not have seen in print - and a good story, by its very nature, is viral - that ancient human art of story telling is not dead. It just exists now in the form of a "Share" button or a Retweet.
So where does the future of the traditional "news" paper sit in all of this?
Advertisers are shifting away from print in droves, taking with them the not insignificant funding they'd once happily provided. Just a few weeks ago, Proctor & Gamble, that bastion of print and broadcast advertising, announced they are cutting 1600 jobs, many of them in marketing, because "facebook and google can be more efficient than traditional media". That's got to hurt.
And hurt it does. Newspapers are shedding journalists at a faster rate than ever before.
So what do you do when your readership is dwindling, your ad sales are struggling and everyone's using other mediums to obtain news?
You panic.
That certainly seems to be the answer that many publishing houses have come up with. Let's try something, anything, to keep going. Doesn't matter what it is.
Which might explain the rash of "me too" daily deal sites launched by established newspapers in recent months.
Inspired by the money making runaway success that is Groupon, publishers are connecting up the obvious dots of Advertiser + Audience = Money.
The Scotsman's having a fling with DealMonster.co.uk, publishing giant DC Thomson's flogging us Beezer Deals, while in other countries the same thing is happening: The Washington Post is promoting Find n Save and there are many more titles across the planet that are doing the very same thing.
Lord help the marketing industry if this is all we're left with as a primary means of reaching consumers. Second only to giving your product away free, it's the most expensive form of advertising I have ever encountered.
Yet, regardless of all this fervent "activity" to generate cash, these publishing houses are missing one key point. Readership figures continue to dwindle. And the reason why? They are no longer selling us news. It's old news.
In fact the situation is so troubling that a site ominously entitled "Newspaper Death Watch" reports that according to academics there will only be four newspapers left in the USA in just five years, wiping out the other 1400 which currently serve that country with their news content. The UK is no different.
Newspapers need to focus on what they bring to the public that no other medium can and does. Advertisers are only interested in one thing at the end of the day: reach. So whether that's in print or online, we want to get our products in front of people. That's why newsprint advertising was so successful for years - they put us on the breakfast table of millions of people every day.
No daily deal site is going to achieve that in the long term. There's a limit to how many daily deal sites we will sign up to as consumers, and to how many deals we want to consume in an average day. I suspect I am not alone in spending the first five minutes of the day deleting several deal offers from my inbox.
So come on Newsprint - we need you to innovate. We don't want to lose you. We still like the experience and the in-depth leisurely read of a newspaper, and with all that attention your product gets, your advertising is bound to be effective, just rethink the content of your core product and stop faffing about with unsustainable diversions.
Or you might just wake up one day and be too late.
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