Pew: 17% of Americans get no news daily
by Andrew Beaujon
Published
Apr. 27, 2012
9:01 am
Updated
Apr. 30, 2012
7:13 am
Pew Internet
Right now, in Perugia, Italy, Pew’s Lee Rainie is scheduled to be giving a talk called “News in a networked world,” about the platforms on which people consume news. If your bosses, like mine, thoughtlessly neglected to send you to Perugia for the International Journalism Festival, here are some highlights of the research he collated for the talk.
Findings:
• 17 percent of all Americans get no news every day. Strangely, that’s the same percentage of Americans who read a newspaper every day. The statistic’s even starker for certain age groups: 31 percent of people ages 18-24 get no news on an average day, and 22 percent of 30-34-year-olds get none either.
• 46 percent of people use 4-6 different platforms to seek news daily. Only 7 percent use one platform.
• 63 percent of respondents last year said the press is politically biased. But Rainie also includes a slide showing how liberals and conservatives gravitate to news organizations and personalities they feel reflect their opinions, so maybe the perception of bias isn’t a negative for many news consumers?
• News consumers use different platforms for different kinds of news: TV owns weather and breaking news; newspapers are the choice for news on community events, crime, and arts; the Internet is where people go to look up restaurants and ties with newspapers for news about “housing, schools and jobs”; radio is a top source for traffic news, but it’s tied with television.
Flip through the presentation:
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I find it interesting that so many public schools have decided that news and current events are not important enough to include in their regular schedules. Sort of sends a skewed perspective to our young people at very early ages.
Andrew: to your first bullet point, Pew’s data says 50% of adults read their local newspaper every day, 17% read a national newspaper. Scarborough data confirms that more than 100 million adults access newspaper content in print and online on an average weekday.
Sheesh.