Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

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News Habits & Media

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Pew Research Center photo illustration.

Local News Fact Sheet

The landscape of local news in the U.S. has changed significantly in recent decades as Americans have been turning away from print and television and toward digital media. In 2025, 21% of Americans say they follow local news very closely, down from 37% in 2016.

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News Habits & Media

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    A New Day at the Newsweeklies?

    Faced with declining circulation and softening ad pages the big newsweeklies are shaking things up. Both Time and Newsweek recently appointed new editors, and the former is changing its publication day and possibly pruning circulation. Are they in the midst of a mere tweaking, or is it the beginning of a major reinvention?

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    Measuring Online Traffic

    In the media business, there’s a raging debate about the accuracy of the numbers that purport to track visitors to the major news web sites. But some analysts say that when it comes to the economics of the Internet, the traditional reliance on audience size may just not be that important to advertisers.

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    Alt-Weekly Readers

    America’s alternative weeklies may have once conjured up coverage of sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll. But as the papers themselves reach middle age, survey numbers show their readers have aged with them—getting married and having kids—which poses a serious challenge: younger upstart publications could steal their readers and advertisers.

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    How 9-11 Changed the Evening News

    When the planes struck New York and Washington 5 years ago today, they altered the course of the news people get as well. According to new numbers from ADT Research, viewers of network evening newscasts have gotten a beefed up diet of war and terror since then while seeing big decreases in coverage of domestic issues, from crime to technology.

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    Charting the Online Revolution

    In the ninth and last of our summer roundtable discussions on the future of the news media, bloggers and analysts discuss how the Internet is transforming the gathering and delivery of information and also offer their ideas on what traditional news organizations must do to keep pace and remain relevant.

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    The Verdict on Couric

    Now that the hype and the waiting is finally over, how did Katie Couric do on her historic opening night at the CBS anchor desk? Not so great, according to dozens of TV critics and commentators who offered up mostly mixed or negative reviews of her inaugural broadcast and snide remarks about her wardrobe.

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    Alternative Weeklies in Transistion

    In the eighth of our roundtable discussions on the future of the news media, representatives of the alternative newsweekly industry survey the changes facing these once comfortably niched papers.

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    Katie Couric: Perky and Cute, But Smart, Informed and Liberal, Too

    Summary of Findings Though Katie Couric has yet to take her seat as the new CBS Evening News anchor, the former Today show co-host is already a more familiar personality than her NBC and ABC counterparts. Asked to give their general impressions of each of the three TV journalists in a single word, 66% could […]

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    Al Jazeera’s Global Gamble

    Officials of Al Jazeera International discuss their plans for launching the English-language version of the controversial Arab news channel. Why the long delays? Is the network anti-American? That, plus, a chronology of the rocky relationship between Al Jazeera and the US government.

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    What’s Next for the Ethnic Media?

    While much of US news media endured shrinking audiences recently, ethnic media have seen growth. In our seventh roundtable discussion, industry analysts assess the growing clout of ethnic news outlets in the US as well as the formidable business challenges they face, including slowing industry growth.

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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.

Features