Pew survey shows online news overtaking print in the US

People who have followed the development of the Internet are probably well aware of the Pew Charitable Trust, which has tracked the growth of the web through its Internet & American Life Project. But a separate arm of the Pew, the Research Center for the People & the Press has uncovered some data relevant to the online world when surveying the US population about the sources of its news. According to the group's latest survey, performed in early December, the use of Internet news sources has passed that of newspapers for the first time.

The survey was performed from December 3rd through 7th, and it involved 1,489 adult participants. Most of the questions involved perceptions of the major news stories of the year, but several focused on the participants' source of news. Here, Internet news sources had very significant gains, with 40 percent of the population saying it's where they get "most" of their national and international news. That's a significant leap from September of 2007, when only 24 percent had called it the source of most of their news.

The use of newspapers as a source has held steady in the mid-30s for the last several years, and came in at 35 percent of the survey population this time around. This steady performance, combined with the significant rise in the use of Internet, has meant that this is the first time since data collection started in 2001 that the newspapers have been pushed out of their second-place slot. Because of the wording of the survey, users could name more than one source for "most" of their news (which is why I keep putting it in quotes); this allowed TV to hold on to its first-place slot, being the choice of 70 percent of respondents. That's actually the lowest result ever, and the first time it's dropped noticeably since 2004, when it was at 74 percent.

These results may have been driven by a major shift in the 19-29 year old age group. In the last year, their news jones has been less satisfied by TV, dropping from 68 percent to 59 percent. The same fraction (59 percent) looked to the Internet for information, a huge rise from the September 2007 survey, when the figure was 34 percent. At the same time, the use of newspapers was up slightly in this population. The Pew report doesn't indicate what percentage of the total survey population fell into this age group, but the usage patterns for the past several years show a fair bit of variability; it's not clear whether an of the changes beyond the rise in Internet use should be viewed as significant.

It would be easy at this point to engage in a bit of Internet triumphalism, and there is some justification for this. It's easier to find specialized news content online, and many papers have responded to declining ad revenues by cutting back on this. In terms of one of my own interests, the death of science content in traditional media (as exemplified by CNN, which recently axed its entire science staff) has definitely left me less interested in getting my news from TV.

Nevertheless, some are arguing that the decline of print is nothing to be celebrated. Although the many eyes of the Internet community can identify stories that might otherwise slip under the radar, few websites have the resources to do the depth of investigation that can be carried out by an experienced news staff. Internet content may have the advantage of being free, but that low price may come at a cost.