From large urban areas to rural communities, Americans often report similarly high levels of interest in news. Still, a national survey shows that community differences emerge in the number and variety of local news sources people use in different types of communities, as well as their degree of “local news participation” through social media and their mobile news consumption.

A new report from the Pew Research Center shows that many of the differences in local news consumption emerging from these data reflect the varying demographic compositions of different community types in the U.S. Some differences in the platforms people use might also be tied to the lower overall use of the internet and mobile platforms in small towns and rural areas.

“Interest in community news on all kinds of topics is quite high in every type of community,” noted Kristen Purcell of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, a co-author of the report. “Still, people get local information in different ways depending on the type of community in which they live, and they differ in the degree to which digital and mobile platforms factor into their mix of sources.”

Normal

0

false

false

false

EN-US

X-NONE

X-NONE

/* Style Definitions */

table.MsoNormalTable

{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;

mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;

mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;

mso-style-noshow:yes;

mso-style-priority:99;

mso-style-qformat:yes;

mso-style-parent:”";

mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;

mso-para-margin-top:0in;

mso-para-margin-right:0in;

mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt;

mso-para-margin-left:0in;

line-height:115%;

mso-pagination:widow-orphan;

font-size:11.0pt;

font-family:”Calibri”,”sans-serif”;

mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;

mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;

mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;

mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;

mso-bidi-font-family:”Times New Roman”;

mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

Nearly three quarters of Americans

(72%) report following local news closely “most of the time, whether or

not something important is happening.” Local newspapers are by far the

source they rely on for much of the local information they need.

One-third of local news enthusiasts

(32%) say it would have a major impact on them if their local newspaper no

longer existed, compared with just 19% of those less interested in local news.

Most likely to report a major impact if their newspaper disappeared are local

news followers age 40 and older (35%), though even among younger local news

followers 26% say losing the local paper would have a major impact on them.

Local news enthusiasts are more

likely than others to prefer newspapers for almost all of 16 topics that were

asked about in a survey, with the exception of weather and breaking news.

Three-in-ten or more local news enthusiasts prefer newspapers for following

crime, local politics, community events, or arts and culture. About one-quarter

prefer newspapers when seeking information about local schools, taxes,

government activity, other local business, and housing issues. Two-in-ten

primarily use newspapers for following restaurants, job openings, or local

zoning issues.

While this

seems to be positive news for local newspapers, in many cases the reliance on

newspapers is heaviest among local news enthusiasts age 40 and older, while

younger local news followers rely more heavily on other sources.  Specifically, among local news enthusiasts

under age 40, the internet is the

preferred source for eight of the 16 topics asked about, including: 

• Local restaurants, clubs and bars
• Other local businesses
• Schools and education
• Local politics
• Jobs
• Housing
• Arts and cultural events
• Community or neighborhood events

Read the full report for more

details on these subjects:

• The demographics of local news enthusiasts
• Technology use
• How local news enthusiasts relate to and perceive their

  communities

• News consumption habits of local news enthusiasts
• Willingness to pay for the local paper, in print and

  online

• Topics of interests for local news enthusiasts

A mounting body of evidence finds that the spread of mobile technology is adding to news consumption, strengthening the appeal of traditional news brands and even boosting reading of long-form journalism. But the evidence also shows that technology companies are strengthening their grip on who profits, according to the 2012 State of the News Media report by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The annual State of the News Media report is a comprehensive analysis of the health of journalism in America, which includes detailed analysis of eight different media sectors as well as an overview that identifies key trends and key findings of the essential statistics about news in the last year.

This year’s study also includes special reports on the impact of mobile technology and social media on news. Those reports, which feature new survey data, finds that rather than replacing media consumption on digital devices, people who go mobile are getting news on all their devices. They also appear to be getting it more often, and reading for longer periods of time. For example, about a third, 34%, of desktop/laptop news consumers now also get news on a smartphone. About a quarter, 27%, of smartphone news consumers also get news on a tablet. These digital news omnivores are also a large percentage of the smart phone/tablet population. And most of those individuals (78%) still get news on the desktop or laptop as well.

A PEJ survey of more than 3,000 adults also finds that the reputation or brand of a news organization, a very traditional idea, is the most important factor in determining where consumers go for news, and that is even truer on mobile devices than on laptops or desktops. Indeed, despite the explosion in social media use through the likes of Facebook and Twitter, recommendations from friends are not a major factor yet in steering news consumption.

Read the full report on the health of American journalism, which also includes findings on:

• How mobile devices are affecting news consumption
• The growing influence of technology giants on the future of news
• How new devices may be helping magazines
• The role of social media in news
• Which media sectors experienced revenue growth last year
• How a visually oriented year helped TV news in 2011
• How Native American communities are turning to cellphones for news

Chapters of the report:

• Overview
• The year in the news
• Newspapers
• Network television
• Local television
• Cable television
• Mobile devices and news consumption
• Digital platforms
• What Facebook and Twitter mean for news
• Audio landscape
• Magazines
• Alternative weeklies
• Community News

for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Internet & American Life

Project in partnership with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The survey, which looks in a new and detailed way at how people learn about community by breaking down local information into 16 key topic areas, also finds that the internet already has a strong hold in the local community. Web-only outlets are now primary source of information on key subjects like education, local business and restaurants. And greater disruption seems to lie ahead. For the 79% of Americans who are online, in addition to Americans ages 18-39, the internet ranks as a top source of information for most of the local subjects studied in the survey.

Read the full report for a detailed breakdown of the top sources of information for 16 different local topics. You’ll also find information on what the most popular local topics are, the use of mobile devices, the impact of social media and differences among demographic groups when it comes to what interests them and where they find their information. Use our interactive graphic to browse the survey results for each news and information topic.

By several measures, the state of the American news media improved in 2010.

After two dreadful years, most sectors of the industry saw revenue begin to recover. With some notable exceptions, cutbacks in newsrooms eased. And while still more talk than action, some experiments with new revenue models began to show signs of blossoming.

Among the major sectors, only newspapers suffered continued revenue declines last year — an unmistakable sign that the structural economic problems facing newspapers are more severe than those of other media. When the final tallies are in, we estimate 1,000 to 1,500 more newsroom jobs will have been lost — meaning newspaper newsrooms are 30% smaller than in 2000.

Beneath all this, however, a more fundamental challenge to journalism became clearer in the last year. The biggest issue ahead may not be lack of audience or even lack of new revenue experiments. It may be that in the digital realm the news industry is no longer in control of its own future.

News organizations — old and new — still produce most of the content audiences consume. But each technological advance has added a new layer of complexity — and a new set of players — in connecting that content to consumers and advertisers.

In the digital space, the organizations that produce the news increasingly rely on independent networks to sell their ads. They depend on aggregators (such as Google) and social networks (such as Facebook) to bring them a substantial portion of their audience. And now, as news consumption becomes more mobile, news companies must follow the rules of device makers (such as Apple) and software developers (Google again) to deliver their content. Each new platform often requires a new software program. And the new players take a share of the revenue and in many cases also control the audience data.

Those data may be the most important commodity of all. In a media world where consumers decide what news they want to get and how they want to get it, the future will belong to those who understand the public’s changing behavior and can target content and advertising to snugly fit the interests of each user. That knowledge — and the expertise in gathering it — increasingly resides with technology companies outside journalism.

In the 20th century, the news media thrived by being the intermediary others needed to reach customers. In the 21st, increasingly there is a new intermediary: Software programmers, content aggregators and device makers control access to the public. The news industry, late to adapt and culturally more tied to content creation than engineering, finds itself more a follower than a leader in shaping its business.

Meanwhile, the pace of change continues to accelerate. Mobile has already become an important factor in news. A new survey released with this year’s report, produced with the Pew Internet & American Life Project, in association with the Knight Foundation, finds that nearly half of all Americans (47%) now get some form of local news on a mobile device. What they turn to most there is news that serves immediate needs — weather, information about restaurants and other local businesses, and traffic. And the move to mobile is only likely to grow. By January 2011, 7% of Americans reported owning some kind of electronic tablet. That was nearly double the number just four months earlier.

The migration to the web also continued to gather speed. In 2010, every news platform saw audiences either stall or decline — except for the internet. Cable news, one of the growth sectors of the last decade, is now shrinking, too. For the first time in at least a dozen years, the median audience declined at all three cable news channels.

For the first time, too, more people said they got news from the web than newspapers. The internet now trails only television among American adults as a destination for news, and the trend line shows the gap closing. Financially the tipping point also has come. When the final tally is in, online ad revenue in 2010 is projected to surpass print newspaper ad revenue for the first time. The problem for news is that by far the largest share of that online ad revenue goes to non-news sources, particularly to aggregators.

In the past, much of the experimentation in new journalism occurred locally, often financed by charitable grants, usually at small scale. Larger national online-only news organizations focused more on aggregation than original reporting. In 2010, however, some of the biggest new media institutions began to develop original newsgathering in a significant way. Yahoo! added several dozen reporters across news, sports and finance. AOL had 900 journalists, 500 of them at its local Patch news operation. By the end of 2011, Bloomberg expects to have 150 journalists and analysts for its new Washington operation, Bloomberg Government. News Corp. has hired from 100 to 150, depending on the press reports, for its new tablet newspaper, The Daily, though not all may be journalists. Together these hires come close to matching the jobs that we estimate were lost in newspapers in 2010, the first time we have seen this kind of substitution.

A report in this year’s study also finds that new community media sites are beginning to put as much energy into securing new revenue streams — and refining audiences to do so — as creating content. Many also say they are doing more to curate user content.

Traditional newsrooms, meanwhile, are different places than they were before the recession. They are smaller, their aspirations have narrowed and their journalists are stretched thinner. But their leaders also say they are more adaptive, younger and more engaged in multimedia presentation, aggregation, blogging and user content. In some ways, new media and old, slowly and sometimes grudgingly, are coming to resemble each other.

The result is a news ecology full of experimentation and excitement, but also one that is uneven, has uncertain financial underpinning and some clear holes in coverage. Even in Seattle, one of the most vibrant places for new media, “some vitally important stories are less likely to be covered,” said Diane Douglas who runs a local civic group and considers the decentralization of media voices a healthy change. “It’s very frightening to think of those gaps and all the more insidious because you don’t know what you don’t know.” Some also worry that with lower pay, more demands for speed, less training, and more volunteer work, there is a general devaluing and even what scholar Robert Picard has called a “de-skilling” of the profession.

Among the features in this, the eighth edition of the State of the News Media produced by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, is a report on how American newspapers fare relative to those in other countries, two reports on the status of community media, a survey on mobile and paid content in local news, and a report on African American media. The chapters this year have also been reorganized and streamlined: each is made up now of a Summary Essay and a longer, separate Data Section where all the statistical information is more easily searchable and interactive.

Read the full report at journalism.org.

Where does the news come from in today’s changing media?

Who really reports the news that most people get about their communities? What role do new media, blogs and specialty news websites now play?

How, in other words, does the modern news “ecosystem” of a large American city work? And if newspapers were to die — to the extent that we can infer from the current landscape — what would that imply for what citizens would know and not know about where they live?

The questions are becoming increasingly urgent. As the economic model that has subsidized professional journalism collapses, the number of people gathering news in traditional television, print and radio organizations is shrinking markedly. What, if anything, is taking up that slack?

The answers are a moving target; even trying to figure out how to answer them is a challenge. But a new study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, which takes a close look at the news ecosystem of one city suggests that while the news landscape has rapidly expanded, most of what the public learns is still overwhelmingly driven by traditional media — particularly newspapers.

The study, which examined all the outlets that produced local news in Baltimore, Md., for one week, surveyed their output and then did a closer examination of six major narratives during the week, finds that much of the “news” people receive contains no original reporting. Fully eight out of 10 stories studied simply repeated or repackaged previously published information.

And of the stories that did contain new information nearly all, 95%, came from traditional media — most of them newspapers. These stories then tended to set the narrative agenda for most other media outlets.

The local papers, however, are also offering less than they once did. For all of 2009, for instance, the Baltimore Sun produced 32% fewer stories on any subject than it did in 1999, and 73% fewer stories than in 1991, when the company still published an evening and morning paper with competing newsrooms.¹ And a comparison of one major story during the week studied — about state budget cuts — found newspapers in the area produced only one-third as many stories in 2009 as they did the last time the state made a similar round of budget cuts in 1991, and the Baltimore Sun one-seventh as many. Yet the numbers suggest the addition of new media has not come close to making up the difference.

Indeed the expanding universe of new media, including blogs, Twitter and local websites — at least in Baltimore — played only a limited role: mainly an alert system and a way to disseminate stories from other places.

New technology was more prevalent as a way for media — both traditional and new — to break news more quickly. The Web is now clearly the first place of publication.

And this faster dissemination of news was tied to three other trends. As news is posted faster, often with little enterprise reporting added, the official version of events is becoming more important. We found official press releases often appear word for word in first accounts of events, though often not noted as such.

In the growing echo chamber online, formal procedures for citing and crediting can get lost. We found numerous examples of websites carrying sections of other people’s work without attribution and often suggesting original reporting was added when none was. We found elements of this in several major stories we traced.

And sometimes old stories that were already obsolete were posted or linked to after events had changed and the original news site had updated them.

These are some of the results of a close examination of the media covering Baltimore, Md., during the week of July 19-25, 2009.

Among the findings:

The network of news media in Baltimore has already expanded remarkably. We identified 53 different news outlets that regularly produce some kind of local news content, a universe that ranges from blogs to talk radio to news websites created by former journalists. These are multi-platform operations that also make robust use of Twitter as a means of dissemination. Twelve of those outlets did not produce any local content during the days studied.²

Among the six major news threads studied in depth — which included stories about budgets, crime, a plan involving transit buses, and the sale of a local theater — fully 83% of stories were essentially repetitive, conveying no new information. Of the 17% that did contain new information, nearly all came from traditional media either in their legacy platforms or in new digital ones.

General interest newspapers like the Baltimore Sun produced half of these stories (48%) and another print medium, specialty newspapers focused on business and law, produced another 13%.

Local television stations and their websites accounted for about a third (28%) of the enterprise reporting on the major stories of the week; radio accounted for 7%, all from material posted on radio station websites. The remaining nine new media outlets accounted for just 4% of the enterprise reporting we encountered.

Traditional media made wide use of new platforms. Newspapers, TV and radio produced nearly a third of their stories on new platforms (31%), though that number varied by sector. Almost half of the newspapers stories studied were online rather than in print.

There were two cases of new media breaking information about stories. One came from the police Twitter feed in Baltimore, an example of a news maker breaking news directly to the public rather than through the press. Another was a story noticed by a local blog, that the mainstream press nearly missed entirely, involving a plan by the state to put listening devices on buses to deter crime. A newspaper reporter noticed the blog and then reported on the story, which led the state to rescind the plan.

As the press scales back on original reporting and dissemination, reproducing other people’s work becomes a bigger part of the news media system. Government, at least in this study, initiates most of the news. In the detailed examination of six major storylines, 63% of the stories were initiated by government officials, led first of all by the police. Another 14% came from the press. Interest group figures made up most of the rest.

Read the full report at journalism.org.

<sub>1. According to Factiva, the Sun produced 23,668 2 stories on all topics from Jan. 1 through Dec. 31, 2009 and 34,852 in the same time frame in 1999 and 86,667 in 1991.
2. Three days of content was analyzed for the study. This included content from July 20, 22 and 24, 2009.</sub>