A new study reveals, despite the seeming deconstruction of traditional news media, people are spending on average nearly 30 percent more time every day accessing news than they were 10 years ago.

Make your firm’s communications newsworthy, not self laudatory, to clients, prospects and referral sources and your law firm marketing plan will have tapped into what The Pew Center for the People and Press study has revealed. Pew’s biennial study of news consumption says people still spend 57 minutes daily getting news from print and broadcast outlets, the same as they did in 2000, albeit more of that time is spent with TV than print media today. However, Pew reports, people also spend an additional 13 minutes accessing news online– 70 minutes in total.  That’s the most time spent daily since Pew began measuring news consumption nearly 20 years ago.

“This underscores the importance of new ways people find news– increasingly from one another,” wrote L. Gordon Crovitz in a column in The Wall Street Journal.

Yet another study by American Lawyer Media says 53 percent of in-house counsel expects to obtain more of their industry news and information through new media in the future.

These studies underscore what we advise our clients to do: consistently create online content that is newsworthy, searchable and forwardable. It’s a mainstay for every law firm public relations plan.

Crovitz said such “citizen editing” is a “key role” that’s growing.  Much of it amounts to filtering and deciding which news from other sources is important to translate. The constant, he said, is “that people want to know what’s going on and will find the most convenient, useful and engaging ways to stay informed.”