Internet More Popular Than Newspapers For News
By Anna Johnson on December 30th, 2008For the first time ever, more Americans get their news from the Internet than from any other source except for television. In particular, more people now get their news from the Net than from newspapers.
According to the News Interest Index, an ongoing project of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 40 percent of Americans get most of their news about national and international issues from the internet, up from just 24 percent in September 2007. Meanwhile, only 35 percent of people get their news from newspapers.
Check out the graph here:
Television continues to be the most popular source for national and international news, with 70 percent of people getting their news from that medium. But don’t expect the dominance of television to continue.
59 percent of Americans aged 30 years or younger get most of their national and international news online; the same percentage of young people cite TV as their main news source. But this reflects a trend towards more online news and less television news. In September 2007, the percentage of young people using television for news was double (68 percent) that of those who used the Internet (34 percent).
Pew’s findings are based on a survey of 1,489 American adults conducted December 3-7, 2008.
