Pew Report Says The Rise of Internet News Is A Shared Experience

These are some of the key findings to come out of a new survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and the Project for Excellence in Journalism aimed at understanding the evolving news landscape.

Courtesy: almaer.com

(SALEM, Ore.) - In the digital era, news has become omnipresent. Americans access it in multiple formats on multiple platforms on myriad devices. The days of loyalty to a particular news organization on a particular piece of technology in a particular form are gone.

The Internet is at the center of the story of how people’s relationship to news is changing.

The process Americans use to get news is based on foraging and opportunism. They seem to access news when the spirit moves them or they have a chance to check up on headlines. At the same time, gathering the news is not entirely an open-ended exploration for consumers, even online where there are limitless possibilities for exploring news.

The Public is Clearly Part of the News Process Now.

To a great extent, people’s experience of news, especially on the Internet, is becoming a shared social experience as people swap links in emails, post news stories on their social networking site feeds, highlight news stories in their Tweets, and haggle over the meaning of events in discussion threads. For instance, more than 8 in 10 online news consumers get or share links in emails.

The rise of the Internet as a news platform has been an integral part of these changes. This report discusses two significant technological trends that have influenced news consumption behavior:

First, the advent of social media like social networking sites and blogs has helped the news become a social experience in fresh ways for consumers. People use their social networks and social networking technology to filter, assess, and react to news.

Second, the ascent of mobile connectivity via smart phones has turned news gathering and news awareness into an anytime, anywhere affair for a segment of avid news watchers.

Below are some of the other key findings:

• The Internet has surpassed newspapers and radio in popularity as a news platform on a typical day and now ranks just behind TV.
• More than half of American adults (56%) say they follow the news “all or most of the time,” and another quarter (25%) follow the news at least “some of the time.”
• 99% of American adults say that on a typical day, they get news from at least one of these media platforms: a local or national print newspaper, a local or national television news broadcast, radio, or the Internet.

News consumption is a socially-engaging and socially-driven activity, especially online. Participation comes more through sharing than through contributing news items themselves.

Only local and national TV news, the latter if you combine cable and network, are more popular platforms than the Internet for news. And most Americans use a combination of both online and offline sources.

Internet users use the web for a range of news, but local is not near the top of the list.

The most popular online news subjects are the weather (followed by 81% of internet news users), national events (73%), health and medicine (66%), business and the economy (64%), international events (62%), and science and technology (60%).

Asked on what subjects they would like to receive more coverage, 44% said scientific news and discoveries, 41% said religion and spirituality, 39% said health and medicine, 39% said their state government, and 38% said their neighborhood or local community.

Good News, Bad News About Media Performance.

When it comes to the quality of coverage itself, respondents give correspondingly mixed signals. Just under two-thirds (63%) agree with statement that “major news organizations do a good job covering all of the important news stories and subjects that matter to me.”

Yet 72% also back the idea that “most news sources today are biased in their coverage.”

Some of the explanation for this dichotomy seems to be rooted in the views of partisans. Liberals and Democrats are more likely to say the big news organizations do a good job on subjects that matter to them, while conservatives and Republicans are the ones most likely to see coverage as biased.

Who Are The News Users?

Online news users skew younger than the general adult population. About two-thirds of online news users (68%) are under age 50, including 29% who are under age 30.

Given their younger age profile, it is not surprising that this group is also more likely than other Americans to have never been married (24% v. 9%) and/or to have young children (36% v. 17%).

Online news users tend to be employed full-time (50%), two-thirds (67%) have at least some college education (including 22% with a bachelor’s degree and 15% with advanced degrees), and their annual household income trends higher than American adults in general.

Racially, this group skews toward Hispanics and whites; while 50% of non-Hispanic African-Americans get their news entirely offline, the same is true of just 38% of non-Hispanic whites and 32% of Hispanics.

Because they represent such a large segment of Internet users, the demographic profile of online news users mirrors that of the online population as a whole, and it reflects the same characteristics that drive both broadband and wireless use.

Yet even among Internet users, those who get news online stand out in terms of their high income and education levels, their young age, their racial/ethnic identity, and their use of broadband and wireless.

Click Here to Read the full Pew Internet News Report

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project is one of seven projects that make up the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit "fact tank" that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world.

Bonnie King, Editor NOTE: Catch the Wave! Advertise on Salem-News.com and be seen by your target market. If you're here--they're here. To request a Salem-News.com Media Kit, email: bonnie@salem-news.com