Pew Report Says Americans Are News Grazers

Posted on Mar 1, 2010

Flickr / LoopZilla

Americans are picking and choosing from an information smorgasbord to get their news, according to a report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, and a large majority are switching between different platforms, with the Internet playing a significant role in their news “grazing.” —KA

PC Magazine:

“Americans have become news grazers both on and offline – but within limits,” Amy Mitchell, deputy director for the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, said in a statement. “They generally don’t have one favorite Web site but also don’t search aimlessly. Most online news consumers regularly draw on just a handful of different sites.”

About 57 percent of people rely on two to five Web sites for news, and only 35 percent have a favorite, Pew found.

Of the 2,259 people surveyed by Pew, about 59 percent get their news from a combination of offline and online sources. Only 7 percent use a single media platform, and those people are most likely to use the Internet or local TV news.

Read more

More Below the Ad

New and Improved Comments

We are launching a major overhaul of our comments section.

In addition to more robust spam filtering and moderation, new features include the ability to rate other comments, sort how they are displayed and respond directly via e-mail or in a thread.

Unfortunately, commenters will lose their existing Truthdig identities. It's a pain, we know, but on the plus side you will now be able to log in with a plethora of options, including Google, Twitter, Facebook and Disqus accounts.

Before launching this system we spent months in discussion with our top commenters. We listened to the feedback and we hope you like what we've come up with.

Please direct any problems or concerns to us via our contact page.