News Sources

Posted on August 17, 2008

What are yours? New studies show, not too surprisingly, that fewer USians are reading newspapers and more are getting their dose of news online. In spite of that, TV is still the prime source for news.

If you look at it demographically, it’s no surprise either that the younger generation get more of their news online whilst the older folks get theirs on the TV and in newspapers.

Out of all those surveyed there was one group, a fairly large group at that — around 25%, that straddle the fence and find a useful place for both the standard old line news sources and the modern online sources. These are people that are generally older, educated, and well off.

Also, more people are watching the cable news channels on TV rather than the regular broadcast channels and polarizing themselves as well — CNN’s viewers are majority Democrat and Fox News viewers are decidedly Republican.

And I am remarkably unconvinced that push news is really what I want to see/hear. I still have a preference for pull news, deciding what headlines on the Internet pique my interest and then researching connected stories from various venues so hopefully I don’t get as much of a skewed view of things shaping my world as I would through traditional means.

That’s one of the reasons I have watched less than 10 hours of television total this entire year. The other, slightly important factor is, there’s nothing on….