Students use online as main news source

Sep 13, 2008 by Dirk Singer

A useful piece of research came out of the recent Online News Association conference in Washington DC, about how the coming generation of media consumers is getting its news.

A few months back BBC political journalist Andrew Marr lamented the demise of serious reporting thanks to the decline of (print) newspapers:

“Teenagers, people in their twenties, even in their late twenties, have now got to the position where they wouldn’t pay for news…they expect it to be a free good on their laptops. My kids wouldn’t dream of buying a newspaper — and we are a newspaper household.”

For the ONA conference, academic Marcus Messner from Virgina Commonwealth University polled his class of 210 students from Feb to April 08, and what he found does tally in with Marr’s comments:

Only 3% of students said their main source of news was a print newspaper. For 38% it was the Web and 35% TV

And what were those online news sources? Google – 20%, CNN – 17%, Yahoo – 15%. But when it came to local paper websites only 4% of students consulted them for news and info

This ties into previous trends about local papers being the ones most at risk in the current media shake-up. National newspapers like the NY Times and Washington Post in the States and Guardian and Telegraph here are adapting to – and investing heavily in – online operations.

But local paper websites seem to leave a lot of readers cold with another US study showing that less than 20% of Internet users had visited their local paper site in the past thirty days. Not surprising when local ‘on the ground’ blogs can do the job just as well as a lot of local papers, if not better.