Some Good News About News?
“There are many more ways to get the news these days, and as a consequence Americans are spending more time with the news than over much of the past decade. Digital platforms are playing a larger role in news consumption, and they seem to be more than making up for modest declines in the audience for traditional platforms. As a result, the average time Americans spend with the news on a given day is as high as it was in the mid-1990s, when audiences for traditional news sources were much larger.”
—Pew Research Center, “Americans Spending More Time Following the News: Ideological News Sources—Who Watches and Why,” Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, Sept. 12, 2010 (Survey conducted June 8-28, 2010)
Editor’s Note: That IS news.
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NOTE: Today’s WORD on Journalism is now on Facebook! Join up and rant daily!
It's encouraging to see that people are still reading/watching the news, as much or more - even if it is not in traditional print formats. The numbers overall are strong - stronger than I had imagined. I can't help being sad about the decline of newspaper readership but "the times, they are a-changin."
ReplyDeleteOn Sep 15, 2010, at 8:20 AM, Jim wrote:
ReplyDeleteToo easy. Tell me how many are just reading the news that supports their private opinions--and are excluding all the rest. "Know your enemy" doesn't seem to apply anymore. Vacant minds are the bad guy's playground.
J
Exactly right, Jim. Hence the tea party. You may remember Les Brown, who was a NYTimes TV critic in the 1980s-90s. He write a piece for me in 1991 that we called "The Paradox of Democracy" in which he tried to worry out what would happen when the "information superhighway" really hit, and everyone could program their own "news." Instead of 70%+ of Americans gathered around the same three network newscasts, he said, when everyone is watching her/his own thing, "where will we all get together and talk?"
ReplyDeleteTed
Depends on what they define as news. News sources no longer focus on news.
ReplyDelete--Lois
(TP note: Great minds think alike, Lois!)
I'm surprised by today's WORD. It's nice to know that Americans are paying attention to the news and are using all sorts of outlets to get access to it. But media is media, and half of the "news" is irrelevant anyway. At the end of the day, most of us are glued to our computer screens and interaction with others is diminishing.
ReplyDeleteRomina Nedakovic