the medium matters: how people get their news

The Pew Research Center recently released a report, “Online Papers Modestly Boost Newspaper Readership.” Many of the statistics used are pretty much what I expected: for younger demographics, more people get their news online, while older demographics are more likely to get their news in print form. It has shows that older people are showing the biggest growth in percentage of people who get their news online. I can understand that older generations are more eager to learn about the internet, while younger ones take it for granted since they have always had it. The report states that 1 in 3 Americans regularly get their news online, which sounds pretty accurate to me. I don’t know if it’s true of my friends and myself as college students, but for society as a whole it does not seem like a stretch to see that many people turn to the Web as a primary source. In a previous reading, we read that many journalists used to view the Web as a supplementary zone and dumping ground for news from other venues, but now journalists are beginning to realize the value of reaching more people easily through the Web.

One of the statistics that surprised me was the one that said that 53% of Americans went online the day before. Maybe my perspective is skewed as a college student or someone from an urban area, but I would say that number should be MUCH higher, especially since they say the internet action can be from work or home. I would say that 80-90% of people I know are online at least once day, even if only for a few minutes. I also found interesting the amount of time people spent each day with different kinds of news coverage. I think part of the reason so much time is spent on TV news is that people tend to turn something on and then leave it in the background while they do other things. For example, turning on the 6:00 p.m. news while eating dinner means a person can have that information in the background while they take care of other things. In other words, a person might not actually be watching for the full 67 minutes cited in the report. Conversely, someone browsing through Web sites is probably actually paying attention the whole time, so they can spend less time with the news but absorb more of it. They can specifically look at the stories they want instead of letting all the news go in the background and waiting for the one story they might be interested in.

I liked what they said about the reputation newspapers have. The section describing how people like to “relax with the paper” I found particularly reassuring. As someone who looks forward to being a print journalist and who also finds something comforting about holding a newspaper and sitting down to read it, it is comforting to know that other people share those same people. Additionally, the section on newspapers points out the speed and convenience of getting news online, which I commented on in the above paragraph. In the breakdown of what people read in newspapers, I was surprised by the increase in interest in religion stories. I thought there would be a bigger increase in interest in international news, especially since 9/11 and the war on Iraq. Instead, more people are interested in local news and business and religion pieces. I think that also reflects the medium in which people get news, but as far as the newspaper sector goes I found those numbers a little surprising.