News Consumption in the USA

We’ve had a fair amount on discuccion on how people consume news in the digital age. A new survey conducted jointly by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Project for Excellence in Journalism  has been released showing that 92% of Americans get their daily news from multiple platforms.  

Apple iPad, Courtesy of Reuters Pictures

The survey shows that the Internet is now the third most-popular news platform.  Moving ahead of more traditional outlets such as newspapers and radio and only just behind local and national television. Six out of ten Americans now get their news from a broad combination of sources and the Internet is allowing them to personalize how they receive their news.  

Personalized: 28% of Internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.    

News is also becoming more participatory with the rising use of social networking technology to filter, assess, and react to news. A press release from the center says that people are also using;

“traditional email and other tools to swap stories and comment on them. Among those who get news online, 75% get news forwarded through email or posts on social networking sites and 52% share links to news with others via those means. ” 

Participatory: 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.  

The results of the survey  also show that mobile technologies are making news more  portable.  

Portable: 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.    

Read the full report here.  

Read the survey questions here.

Challenges to online integrity

There are many traditional and reliable sources for online public service news. That’s a given. But what is it that will undermine this?

Falsehood can come in many different forms. Individual opinions broadcast as fact through blogs, Twitter accounts or Facebook pages or possibly more worryingly, the views of groups and businesses. Possibly the worst cases of reporting falsehoods on the internet must be through the imitation of reliable sources. From imitating the Dalai Lama on Twitter to a direct clone of the BBC website, consumers have to become more wary.

But what of existing “trusted” sources? Without such stringent regulation, the internet gives journalists and editors the opportunity to publish stories and information that may not have cut the mustard to get onto the TV, on the radio or in a newspaper. Facts may not be as well founded, balance may not be as vigorously applied and assumptions may be made on outdated sources. But don’t forget all of these things will inevitably lead to more freedom of speech and the lack of internet regulation has let to the events that saw the exposure by the Guardian of the oil company Trafigura, who dumped toxic waste off the coast of Africa.  Currently the only way to check the integrity of a story on the internet is by cross checking it across different new sources. Better still to check it across different platforms – Social networking/news websites/TV/radio.

What for the future? Will this be automated for us? Will news become more reliable than ever before? Or will the integrity of news be lost forever as it becomes more and more diluted by opinion and Chinese Whispers?