Online News Consumption Is Flat

By: Wayne Robins The Internet brought on the era of the 24/7 news cycle, wired and wireless, when you want it and where you want it. The trouble is that not that many more people are seeking new media than those who relied on the old.

That is one of the downbeat revelations of a study released by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press in Washington, D.C. The center's biennial media survey showed that 25% of Americans go online for news at least three times a week. That's barely a blip more than the 23% who did so two years ago.

There was great hope in recent years that the Internet would appeal to younger news consumers who weren't in the newspaper habit, and grab some of the busy two-parent working families and hardworking singles who didn't have time to catch TV network news.

"Now it seems that the universe for news consumers is finite and doesn't seem to be growing," said Carroll Doherty, an editor at the Pew Center.

The Pew survey suggests that the most recent wide adopters of the Internet, including African-Americans, high school graduates, and older people as classified by the study, are not becoming online news junkies. Fifty-three percent of blacks surveyed now use the Internet, but only 26% go online looking for news even once a week.

Growth in daily newspaper readership? Fuhgeddaboudit: Only 41% of the respondents said they read a newspaper the previous day, down from 47% two years ago.

One has to do creative accounting to get a dollop of good news from the Pew Survey. It's good, for example, that 30% of those under age 30 go online for news at least three times a week. But the percentage hasn't grown since the last survey two years ago, and more significantly, as many young Americans are just as likely to seek no news from any medium as they are to go on the Web for it.

Perhaps "news" in whatever form has become so ubiquitous, that we are so drenched in information, that news doesn't even stand out as a category. "What we don't know is what people consider to be news on the Internet," Doherty said. "Is it just people who go online to check the weather, then go back to e-mailing their grandmother?" For news organizations, Doherty said, the message is: Find better ways to connect.

The study was based on a telephone survey of 3,000 respondents between April 26 and May 12. The center's Web site is http://people-press.org/.