Where did you get your news yesterday, and how much time did you spend getting it?
According to the latest survey from the Pew Research Center (the best source for such stuff, IMHO), if you’re an average American you spent 70 minutes gathering your news, allocated as follows:
Newspapers (specifically, the printed variety) continue to take it on the chin. Since 2006, the percent who read a newspaper in print “yesterday” declined from 38% to 26%.
Altogether, 44% of Americans say they went online in some fashion “yesterday” to get their news — everything from news websites to cell phones, email social nets, and podcasts.
For in-depth reporting, the Wall St Journal and NY Times still significantly outdistance the pack.
As usual, this Pew research is full of data on Americans’ news seeking, perceptions of a wide range of news sources, and news preferences by political orientation.
A “must read” report for anyone working on the communications side of your nonprofit.
Tom
P.S. If you had difficulty accessing the “GoldMail” demonstration using the links in yesterday’s email feed, please go directly to the post on The Agitator website, where the links will work fine. It’s well worth the visit … we think GoldMail is a quite powerful tool, and the folks behind it are making a free offer to Agitator’s nonprofit subscribers.
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This graph sucks! The average time spent with each news source seems to be analyzed as a metric of the popularity and relative influence of each source. However, as should be obvious, these are different forms of media and the amount of time that it takes to glean information from each of these sources is wildly different. Is it really surprising that the average tv news viewing time is slightly over 30 minutes? Does this account for the 8 minutes of commercials per hour that you must sit through to see a regular “30 minute” news broadcast? Beyond that, the conflation of online and print newspapers makes the (already difficult to interpret) stacked area graph completely misleading. Assuming online and print sources are part of a general category “news in print” then the proportion of time spent at each news source is roughly static. The only number that you can actually draw any conclusions from is the total amount of time spent gathering news, and the fluctuation of this number over time is not large and it isn’t really trending. In short, most of the conclusions that this graph seems to suggest are unsupported by the data. We should expect better.
**above post should read “8 minutes of commercials per half hour”**
Now if only the news was worth spending that much time on.