Laura Houston Santhanam

As far back as 2004, Pew Research Center wrote that local news on the radio “appears to have seriously eroded in recent years” with a growing number of stations that “are not local at all.” Then in 2006 we wrote, “Technology is turning what we once thought of as radio into something broader – listening,” and raised the question of what that would mean for radio news. Now, heading into 2013, those two shifts have come together to create a very different audio landscape—one in which news is relegated to a smaller corner of the listening landscape.

The news programs that Americans watch on national cable channels and their local television stations have changed significantly in recent years while the network evening newscasts have remained remarkably stable, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center.

Probably the biggest development in the audio landscape in 2011 came in the growth of people listening on digital mobile devices. And one of the prime arenas for device use was car listening, the long-established domain of AM/FM radio.

While print newspapers everywhere face difficult challenges in the future, newspapers in the United States today are suffering more acutely than those virtually anywhere else in the world. In sharp contrast with the U.S. situation, overall print newspaper circulation worldwide has dipped only slightly so far in 2010. Revenues are expected to rise, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.