The Knight News Challenge described newspapers as the glue that used to hold communities together. By October 2007 the argument here was that the glue had moved: what held people together online was not the news media but Facebook and MySpace.
The evidence was a report by Ipsos Reid on Canadian use of social networks. Canadians were spending an average of 5.4 hours a week on them; nearly one in four had visited an online social network, and 29 per cent had placed a profile on at least one. Among younger Canadians the figures were far higher — two-thirds visiting such sites and just over half posting a personal profile.
Scott Patton, the firm’s senior research manager for Western Canada, called it “a staggering result given that these sites didn’t exist four years ago”, noting that Facebook and MSN Spaces had both launched in early 2004 and that no other internet activity Ipsos Reid had measured had grown at that rate. The same report cautioned that the growth might not continue at the same pace.
The conclusion drawn was about succession rather than speed. The young people on Facebook in 2007 were not going to turn to newspapers for social glue as they aged; they would carry their digital habits with them, and the task for news organisations was to become part of those communities instead of waiting for the audience to come back.