Monday, March 07, 2005

More People Turning To Online News

As WebProNews reported During the 2004 presidential campaign, six times as many people used the internet to get political news as they did in 1996.
... The influence of newspapers dropped to 39 percent last year, from 60 percent in 1996, according to the joint, telephone-based survey from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and the Pew Internet and American Life Project.


BusinessWeek reports Americans who got campaign news over the Internet were more likely to visit sites of major news organizations like CNN and The New York Times (43 percent) rather than Internet-only resources such as candidate Web sites and Web journals, known as blogs (24 percent).

You can see the bias of the media, in that when they identify major news organizations they just list extreme left wing sites like CNN and The New York Times.

Fifty-eight percent of political news users cited convenience as their main reason for using the Internet. This group was more likely to use the Internet sites of traditional news organizations or online services.

But one-third of political news consumers cited a belief that they did not get all the news and information they wanted from papers and television, and another 11 percent said the Web had information not available elsewhere. These individuals were more likely to visit blogs or campaign sites for information.

And blogs, Rainie said, likely had an indirect influence on what campaigns talked about and what news organizations covered.... Blogs "are having a modest level of impact on the voter side and probably a more dramatic impact on the institutional side," Rainie said. "Blogs are still a realm where very, very active and pretty elite, both technologically oriented people and politically oriented people go."

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