By Ryan G. Murphy, RTDNA Digital Media Editor

As a child, I can recall lying slumped across Grandma’s couch with my cousins whining “we’re bored,” while the grown-ups laughed merrily in the dining room, presumably doing something much more fun than children under 21 years of age are privy to.

Undoubtedly we’d eventually make our complaints known to a seemingly-empathetic adult who’d invariably reply with something like, “Bored? You don’t know the meaning of bored! When I was a kid, we played with a stick.”

The kids would, of course, roll their eyes and shudder at the thought of having a stick, and not Nintendo, to go home to when the festivities wrapped up at Grandma’s.

Admittedly, I played my fair share of video games as a child and watched more hours of TV than mom thought healthy for the eyes, but certainly not almost eight hours worth.

A recent report from the Program for the Study of Media and Health at the Kaiser Family Foundation found that American children and teens are watching TV, using the Internet, playing video games and on mobile phones for almost eight hours a day.

Does that surprise you at all?

It doesn’t surprise me even a little. And it shouldn’t surprise you either.

Consider the options: cell phones, iPods, iPhones, Blackberries, MP3s, laptops, desktops, school computers, televisions, mobile televisions, radios, internet radio, Xbox, PS3, Wii, DVD players, portable DVD players, Kindles, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter. The list is vast. Feel free to make your own additions based on your own children’s digital media preferences.

"It's more than seven and a half hours a day, seven days a week," said report co-author Victoria Rideout, vice president and director of the program, in a HealthDay article that circulated the Internet on Wednesday. "That's more than 53 hours a week -- more time than grownups spend in a full-time job."

There is certainly the obvious health angle to take on this story, but I’ll save that for network news. We are, after all, in the business of getting multiple generations to spend a few minutes of those eight hours on our sites, so in some ways, this is good news.

It’s no surprise to find in the report that fewer children are reading magazines and newspapers. The good news for those of us in news, though, is that online news media consumption has increased. Social networking sites like Facebook were specifically named in the report as top influencers during the children’s day.

Most of us in digital news are on board with the concept of social media outreach and many news organizations we work for and follow are making their products more accessible via podcasts, web casts, iPhone apps, on social networks and mobile friendly sites.

If you’re working for a news organization that’s not, it may be time to stand up and jump on the digital bandwagon, so to speak. Increasingly, a younger generation is becoming part of your audience and their expectations – as shown in this study – are that you’ll be able to deliver information quickly on multiple platforms. Outreach is important, but so is ingenuity.