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Brain PowerThinking About Multitasking: It’s What JournalistsNeed to DoHeavy media multitaskers ‘are often influenced by intervening content. Newsarticles are therefore going to require more recapitulations and reminders tohelp readers pick up where they left off.’BY CLIFFORD NASSWhen people multitask withmedia they are consumingtwo or more streams ofunrelated media content. (Dealingwith two related media streams hasdifferent dimensions.) It doesn’t matterexactly what information they aretaking in or what devices they are using;just the act of using two or moremedia streams simultaneously meansthat consumers are engaging in whatis an increasingly frequent pursuitin our digital age. Perhaps they aresearching on a Web site while textingon their phone. Or they are tuning into a YouTube video while exchanginge-mails on a laptop. Maybe CNN isplaying on their screen and they aretracking the news while chatting onlineabout work in one window andconnecting with a friend several timezones away via Skype.Or maybe all of these things arehappening at once.Given what we’re finding out aboutmedia multitasking, it is much moreubiquitous and involves many morestreams of content than is commonlyappreciated. Based on surveys we havedone at Stanford University, the averageuniversity student is regularly usingfour different media streams; fewerthan 5 percent of students report thatthey regularly use a single stream, andmore than 20 percent are using sixor more streams at one time. Otherresearch suggests that this method ofhandling media is increasing acrosspopulations ranging from infants (e.g.,breast-feeding babies will watch televisionwhen their mothers are doingso) to adults in the work force (e.g.,many companies require workers torespond immediately to multiple mediachannels, such as mobile phones, chatand e-mail).Journalists are adapting—withvarying degrees of frustration andconsternation—to the unwillingnessof the growing number of mediamultitaskers to focus on one streamof content, regardless of how engagingit might be. Given the urge toconsume as much unrelated contentas possible, readers demonstrate anunwillingness, for example, to staywith long-form journalism; the longerthe article, the greater the frequencyreaders show of bouncing around andeventually drifting to other mediastreams. Similarly, how stories arebeing told must become less complexas readers show an unwillingness toallocate enough attention to workthrough difficult material.At a more macro level, one seesincreasing concessions to heavy mediamultitaskers in the clustering of storieson the Web. In the early days of digitalnews, links would augment a storywith supporting video or prior coverageon its topic. In the second phase, thenumber of links increased, and therelationships between the story andlinks became more tenuous (e.g., having“international news” or “politics”in common). Today, numerous linkslike Top Stories, Editor’s Picks, andArticles You Might Be Interested In arescattered throughout each Web pageand the relationship between the basestory and the links tends to vanish.Heavy Media MultitaskersWhile these responses to changingreading styles are important to understand,journalists are now being confrontedwith an even more importantsituation brought about by this growthin media multitasking. Now evident tothose of us who study media multitaskingare fundamental changes in theway heavy media multitaskers (HMMs)process information. Research I didwith Eyal Ophir and Anthony Wagnerthat we published in the Proceedingsof the National Academy of Sciencesshows that HMMs—who are alreadya large and rapidly growing part ofthe population—are much worse thanprevious generations of readers atthree tasks that reporters have beenNieman Reports | Summer 2010 11