PEJ State of the News Media 2010: News readers use 5 sites or less

Posted by Trafton Kenney on March 15, 2010 at 2:25 PM

Despite the dizzying amount of news content available online today, it seems many readers are reluctant to venture too far from their circuit of favorite sites.

According to a new study released Monday by the Pew Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, only 35 percent of people who use the internet to read news have a favorite website, and only 21 percent are "monogamous," or rely on only one site for news. Of the same audience, 57 percent rely on two to five sites for news.

Just 7 percent of people surveyed said they would pay to access news online, while 19 percent of "monogamous" readers who favor a particular site claim they would be willing to pay for news content. While the report may sound ominous to many in print media, many newspapers consider any figure over 5 or 10 percent to be a potential boon to their proposed pay walls.

Interestingly, using data from Nielsen Online, the report found that of the thousands of sites providing news in the United States, seven per cent receive 80 percent of Internet traffic. Visitors stay longer on top news sites than they do on aggregators' websites.

In general, the 2010 State of the News Media report stressed the importance of finding new revenue models, noting that the total loss in newspapers' ad revenue over the last three years was 43% and estimating that the newspaper industry has lost $1.6 billion in annual reporting and editing capacity since 2000, or roughly 30%. "there is little evidence that journalism online has found a sustaining revenue model," the report states, and although several publications and Journalism Online are looking at charging for online content, it is far from clear whether this is going to work.

The report does believe that "Citizen journalism at the local level is expanding rapidly and brimming with innovation" and highlighted the success of specialized national and international sites such as ProPublica and GlobalPost. Such efforts cannot yet make up for the loss in reporting capabilities at newspapers, but "Is there some collaborative model that would allow citizens and journalists to have the best of both worlds and add more capacity here?" the report asks. It stresses the extent to which the futures of old and new media are connected, and predicts an increase in attention in a "pro-am" (professional and amateur) model for news.

Source: Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, The New York Times