More And More Americans Using Net For News

Americans are turning to the Internet for their news in greatly increasing numbers, a new study from the Pew Research Center shows. One in five people, or 20 percent, of all Americans now go surfing for news at least once a week, the center said.

What’s more, the percentage of Americans getting news from the Internet at least once a week more than tripled in the past two years, from 11 to 36 million news users, Pew Research Center officials said. Only six percent of all Americans were getting news from online sources in 1996, according to Pew Research Center’s survey. Pew Research interviewed nearly four thousand people in two separate surveys to come up with its Biennial News Consumption Survey results. Among its findings:

Science, health, finance and technology were big news draws for those people who are going online.

Users said that their Web surfing is not cutting into their time in reading or viewing other more traditional news sources. "Analysis of the polling confirms this in finding that their news consumption patterns do not differ significantly from non-users, all other things being equal," center officials said.

The center’s research broke down the American public into six categories when it came to their news habits. Most Americans who surf the Web for news are in the "serious news audience" classification, have a relatively high interest in subjects like politics and science/ technology, are morning news consumers, and pay close attention to national and international news. The serious news audience is 55 percent male, well-educated, and leans to the Republican party.

Cable TV, though, still beats the Internet in terms of impact. About 40 percent of Americans regularly watch cable news networks like CNN and MSNBC.

Network television’s nightly news programs took it on the chin in the survey — only 38 percent of Americans said they were regular viewers, and of that 38 percent, most were older women. Sixty percent of Americans polled regularly tuned into network news in 1993.

But American television might be in the dawn of the golden age when it comes to TV news magazines, as network fare like 60 Minutes and Dateline NBC keep growing in popularity, especially among younger people.

And what of the newspaper? Only 28 percent of people under 30 said they had read a newspaper within 24 hours of their taking the survey. Some 69 percent of seniors, though, said they had read a paper within a day of answering the study.

Pew Research Center’s Web site is at http://www.people-press.org. The full text of the survey is available at the site.

(Contact: Pew Research Center, 202-293-3126)