Our colleagues at the Pew Research Center for The People & The Press today released a major new report about the way people get news. The Center does this survey every two years and this version found that Americans’ use of traditional sources of news has continued to decline and the internet as a news source has continued to rise, though both trends have moderated. The report can be viewed here. It is based on a nationally-representative survey of 3,204 American adults from April 27 to May 22 this year The report is full of interesting insights for news consumers and market research nuggets for news organizations. Some of the gems in the data:
Some 80% of adults agree with the statement that “there are so many ways to get the news these days that I don’t worry when I don’t have a chance to read the paper or when I miss my regular news program.”
This suggests that people know they will bump into important news if they are online, or friends will pass it along quickly.
Another sign of the same phenomenon: On a typical day, a quarter of those who say they got news from newspaper websites said they actually encountered the news on non-newspaper web sites. It is also shared through such things as newsletters and aggregation web sites. One of the best aggregation web sites for news about the news business is run by our colleagues at the Center for Excellence in Journalism (http://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/).
This finding was included in our report on the impact of broadband growth on the consumption of news on the internet: here.
