Wednesday, July 08, 2009

From the Centre College Alumni Survey.

When asked to list their most important source of news, the alumni said:

10% Local television
8% Network television
13% Cable television
19% Local newspaper
8% National newspaper
17% Radio
23% Websites
(Less that 1 percent said that they did not follow the news).

I am particularly impressed at how many list websites as their primary news source. This is surely a big change from even five years ago.

7 comments:

virginia said...

Did the survey distinguish between newspapers in print and newspapers online? For example, would a person who gets their news from nytimes.com be getting it from a national newspaper or a website?

Gruntled said...

Hmm, that is a fine question. No, I did not ask them to distinguish. Same problem with cnn.com vs. CNN.

Kerri said...

I would say that the "radio" category could also be broken down further... NPR and AM talk are very different creatures.

Gruntled said...

I actually asked about local radio vs. national radio, but there were so few local radio listeners that I combined them. The few comments on this item named National Public Radio specifically.

Kelly said...

The newspaper/ cable outlet website question is important. I don't read newspapers in print, or watch much news on tv outside of The Daily Show, but I get most of my non-entertainment news from newspaper sites, Anderson Cooper's twitter feed, and links from online news aggregates. That's sometimes (though not always or altogether) different, I think, than getting all of my news from The Huffington Post.
Maybe differentiate between blogs and sites that claim to be opinion-free fact based news? I don't know that you can completely categorize them, but that's how they are separated in my head.

Kelly said...

Interesting and semi-related survey-

http://consumerist.com/5310573/people-trust-stuff-they-read-online-more-than-nearly-any-other-medium

Gruntled said...

Kelly, I think this survey is being taken in the midst of a revolution in news. Three years ago the web would not have been a big player; three years from now I will need a whole section on websites. I did ask a separate question about which websites and blogs you regularly read, but I specifically exempted regular news sites. More on this as the analysis unfolds.