I’ve never had a newspaper that I felt attached or affiliated to; not in terms of political ideas, style of writing, news agenda or otherwise.While some read either the Guardian because they have left wing views or the Telegraph because they agree with the conservative ideas and agenda, me? I’m a floater.
I like the Sun because of the shocking headlines, I like the Guardian on a Monday for the media section, I like the Mirror’s website for unusual articles, and I like TelegraphTV for as-it-happens news on demand.
The same goes for magazines, I know countless girls who like the features in Marie Claire, the ‘gossip’ in Heat and the pictures in OK, the feist of Cosmopolitan but the shopping pages of Grazia.
Rather than read just one title a week or month they, and I include myself, read around the titles on the shelf to get all the pages they want, from the publications that do it – the way they want it.
I guess that means we’re already part of the fragmenting audience.
Shane Richmond, Communities Editor at telegraph.co.uk, notes how where communities once used to build around titles, and loyalty with it, the nature of online publications and aggregation tools allow users to now just take the bits they want from media content.
Communities are now building around particular sections of a publication, such as the sport section of telegraph.co.uk, the fashion pages of Grazia, getting the media news delivered to their desktop by RSS from the Guardian, or taking articles from various places and bringing them back to their own forum for debate and conversation.
But I’m not sure it’s ever really been that different, people have always read along the shelf, but so long as the whole publication was still bought I guess no-one really noticed that many of us were only reading a small section, rather than the whole package.
