Americans turning to online news
8 March 2005
Internet news is becoming increasingly popular in the United States, a new study claims.
Almost one in five (18 per cent) of American adults cited the internet as one of their two main sources of news about the presidential races, compared with just three per cent in 1996.
A further twenty-eight per cent of the 2,200 adults quizzed said they primarily used news pages of AOL, Yahoo, Google News and other online services that aggregate and let users search through thousands of online news sources.
The influence of newspapers dropped from 60 per cent in 1996 to 39 per cent in 2004, according to the survey from the Pew Research Center. The influence of television grew only slightly from 72 per cent to 78 per cent.
Most of those surveyed said they prefer to go to major news sites such as CNN, The New York Times and Reuters, as opposed to their televised or print editions. 24 per cent said they also liked to visit the candidate's campaign websites and journals during an election.
Over half (58 per cent) of internet news readers said they used online news as a convenience, while 33 per cent of readers pointed out that they were not satisfied with the news delivered by newspapers, as it was not updated often enough and failed to provide enough information.
Most internet news readers also said they liked to visit blogs, as they generated interesting conversations about the elections and even helped 40 per cent of Internet news readers made up their minds about the candidates.
The study found that many of the readers came from minority groups interested in elections, such as women, older citizens, lower-income households and others.
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