Thursday, October 11, 2012

Is the Internet undermining print and radio?

According to Pew more people read news online than read the newspaper for news. I've worried before about how reporting is supposed to be funded if everybody gets news for free, but that's a side issue here.

The received wisdom is that people quit reading papers because the newspaper cost money, but online news is free.


This image is from Pew Research Center.

They don't show numbers from before 2004 for online news, but two things jump out at me here. Rates of reliance on newspaper and radio news are almost the same, and show a long steady drop that began well before there was much in the way of internet news. And the rate of increase of internet news use grew faster than the newspaper use dropped.

I can guess why TV news didn't fall that rapidly: they have the tools to jazz it up and make entertainment of it in ways radio doesn't. Reading about an attack isn't as gripping as seeing the blood, and though you don't actually learn anything new watching a reporter standing in the hurricane you get the race-car thrill of wondering if something will blow him away.

Radio news is succinct: so much so that there's neither depth nor breadth. All Some Things Considered is a bit of an exception to the depth, if you make proper allowances for their bias in material to report on.

But the newspaper allows quite a bit of detail. True, most of the stories tend to be thumbnail reports, and important local trends are sometimes covered up.

Why both newspaper and radio track each other so closely puzzles me. Perhaps both were found wanting and people gave up on news? Since the trend is independent of internet developments I don't see how the net is responsible for their losses.

The rapid rise of internet news readers shows there is a market for news. There's no breakdown for how many different sources or aggregators people used. I'd like to see that, and also what sources they used.

For example, if John Doe watches MSNBC his iPhone, is that TV or Internet? If it is the same program? If it is the same style of infotainment even if it isn't the same program?

Is it news if it is about celebrities trying to get attention?

From the lack of effect on other media I tentatively guess that a goodly part of the rise in internet news is really a rise in TV-affiliated infotainment.

We have no TV (years ago I learned that the information density in TV news was very low). We subscribe to two newspapers: a county daily and a local weekly. I listen to the radio for about 30 minutes a day (15minutes to and 15minutes from work), only about 2-4 minutes of which is news. The vast majority of news I find online, because it is there and not available in the paper or the radio.

5 comments:

Assistant Village Idiot said...

I was getting my news online in 1998, via Drudge, but I don't think I was much before that. In the 90's I got news indirectly, via National Review or talk radio with news at the top of the hour. Occasional newspapers.

I don't remember how I got news in the 80's. We have never taken a daily paper,so I am thinking it must have been primarily magazines and radio. Newsweek, major networks. I don't think I followed it much.

james said...

BBC's web site launched in 1997, New York Times in 1996, and the first was a British paper that I don't recall. (Somewhere I have a registration cookie from them.) Of course there'd been online news before then behind paywalls, but I don't think those had a huge impact.

Some news went out via Usenet, along with an amazing amount of nonsense. I subscribed to several newgroups such as comp.os.vms and rec.humor.funny. rec.humor wasn't funny--go figure.

I don't believe that the news volume going to geeks such as us would have put a serious dent in the radio/newspaper rates.

Texan99 said...

In the 80s we subscribed to a local Houston newspaper as well as the NYT and the WSJ. By the mid-90s we had bid farewell to the NYT, though I still occasionally follow links to its (usually ridiculous) coverage. We pay for online access to the WSJ now but dispensed with the paper version years ago.

We also gave up the print version of the Houston paper a long time ago. For that matter, there's not much point any more going to its website, and I rarely bother. As an example, the day after the VP debate, I could find no coverage anywhere on the Chronicle website of either the debate or the developments in Benghazi. The paper runs fluffy local stories, sports, and a few AP reprints of what little news is permitted to pass the filter.

I get a bit of news from the TV, but mostly from other websites.

james said...

A couple of years ago someone tried to put our local town's news on the web. It wasn't updated very often. I guess the ad revenue stream wasn't enough to support it. So we buy the city weekly, and it is still useful for local news, especially if you keep up with high school sports (I don't). It is not much use for state or national news, but very good for finding out what the local theater company is doing and if we know anybody in the police blotter.

Texan99 said...

Yes, we rely on the very local tiny semi-weekly to see what the county commissioners' court is up to, or what building burned down in town. They're online, and actually work to update themselves daily, so we rarely bother with the paper edition. It's mostly sports, obits, and rudimentary coverage of the city councils.

I wouldn't pull up the online Corpus Christi newspaper (closer than Houston) unless I were looking for a specific semi-local story.

Neither of these papers has what you would call actual reporters, beyond checking on the police blotters and that sort of thing. It must be getting awfully hard for traditional reporters to stay employed. A big part of my extended family used to be in that business, but my uncle is long since retired and my cousins now work for the wire services or for weekly community papers -- except for one who's still at the Austin American-Statesman in some kind of administrative position.