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News Habits & Media

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News Media Tracker

Americans now navigate a quickly changing information environment, with a wide variety of news sources across many different platforms and channels. Explore data on how Americans use, trust and distrust 30 major news sources with our interactive tool.

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News Habits & Media

Publications

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    Too Much Anna Nicole, But the Saga Attracts an Audience

    Summary of Findings Most Americans feel the press has gone overboard in covering the death of Anna Nicole Smith. Fully 61% believe the Smith story has been overcovered, far more than the number saying that about any other recent story. Even so, a sizable minority (11%) followed Smith’s death more closely than any of last […]

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    Hands Off The High School Paper

    Student journalists and school personnel have been known to clash on occasion over what news is fit to print. Now precedent-setting legislation wending its way through the Washington State House is intended to give students more control over and responsibility for the content of the school publication.

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    The “News and Schmooze” Explosion

    A new study finds a proliferation of “citizen media” web sites that fit somewhere on the media spectrum between the street-corner soapbox and the local daily newspaper. While concluding that these grassroots outlets are successful at creating community conversations, the report on this emerging landscape also reveals that many are tenuous, shoestring operations.

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    Election Newshounds Speak Up

    Americans flocked in record numbers to their favorite media sources for political news last fall. In this report, fans of newspaper, TV and online news sites tell how and why they differ.

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    The Talk is All About Iraq, Clinton, and Bush

    The cable talkers didn’t have much to say about the State of the Union address, and the liberal hosts didn’t weigh in on Clinton’s presidential bid. But war and politics still managed to dominate the talk show agenda last week—even more so than the overall news coverage.

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    A Rough Year for News Magazines

    If Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report were hoping that 2006 would offset poor advertising numbers in 2005, they will be disappointed. The year-end figures are now in and they show that the number of ad pages at the three big newsmagazines barely inched up. The magazine industry generally, indeed, is suffering something of a malaise.

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    Newspapers See a President Seeking a Last Chance

    How did the press cover the President’s State of the Union address? Did it emphasize his domestic policy agenda or did Iraq policy grab the headlines? Did the media focus on his appeal for another chance on Iraq or his defiance on that subject? A PEJ review of front-page headlines on the day after finds the answers.

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    Election 2006 Online

    Twice as many Americans used the internet as their primary source of news about the 2006 campaign compared with the most recent mid-term election in 2002.

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    Will the Times Pull the Plug on its Ombudsman?

    More than three years ago, in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, the New York Times announced it would hire its first-ever public editor or ombudsman to act as an independent monitor of the paper. Now a published report raises the issue of whether the Times is thinking about eliminating the position. Such a decision would likely reverberate throughout the newspaper industry. What are Times officials thinking?

Signature Reports

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Pew Research Center illustration for America's News Influencers report; photos via Getty Images

America’s News Influencers

This study explores the makeup of the social media news influencer universe, including who they are, what content they create and who their audiences are.

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