The News

Volume 1, Issue 1
While headlines claim that newspapers are dying, print outlets still provide news content for other media. In addition, audiences have grown for news websites, National Public Radio, alternative weeklies and ethnic media. Given these trends, the challenge and opportunity is to design smart, strategic campaigns that effectively target, inform and influence diverse audiences.

What follows is a snapshot of current media trends based on sources from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, Pew Internet & American Life Project, and the Newspaper Association of America, among others.

PRINT    Newspaper circulation is on the decline, but print continues to drive news content for other media.

•    The combined circulation of American daily newspapers has fallen steadily since 1987. On average, newspapers dropped 17% in daily circulation and 12% in Sunday circulation. 

•    Despite this decline, readership grew in 2007 for online editions of newspapers and the ethnic press, while alternative weeklies held steady. Moreover, print organizations continue to provide news content for popular websites such as Yahoo News. 

•    From 2006 to 2007, the audience for newspaper websites grew by 6% to about 60 million unique visitors per month.  Websites with the most traffic are NYtimes.com (13.8 million unique visitors a month), Washingtonpost.com (11.7 million) and USAtoday.com (9.2 million).

•    The annual circulation of alternative newsweeklies grew from 3.1 million in 1990 to 7.5 million in 2006 and 2007.  About 41% of their readers are 45 or older while 37% are age 18 to 34. 

•    The number of Hispanic newspapers grew by 28% to 768 from 2000 to 2006, the latest year with data available. Over half of these are weeklies and community newspapers published in Spanish.

•    Among Hispanic newspapers, weeklies showed the biggest growth in circulation from 11.1 million in 2005 to 11.4 million in 2006. 

RADIO    Radio’s reach into American households is shrinking. But public radio, particularly National Public Radio, has seen significant growth.

•    No news organization has matched the audience growth of NPR. Since 1996, NPR’s audience has doubled to nearly 30 million weekly listeners in 2007. 

•    With 47 million listeners each week, news/talk radio is increasingly popular: the number of stations that carry this format swelled from about 400 nationwide in 1990 to 1,503 in 2007.

•    The average age of public radio’s news/talk listeners is 52. More than half of these listeners live in households with incomes of $75,000 or more, and 90% have attended college. 

•    From 1998 to 2006, the number of Spanish-language radio stations in the United States increased by 37% to 730 stations.

TV    While local television remains America’s most popular news medium, its audience is decreasing.

•    More Americans get news from local TV than from any other media. According to a recent Pew survey, 71% of Americans reported regularly watching local TV news in 2007.

•    From 2006 to 2007, average local news ratings for the four major networks –ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC affiliates – dropped 3.8% for evening news and 4.3% for late news, while morning news held steady.

•    The evening network newscasts (CBS, ABC and NBC) averaged 23.1 million viewers each evening in 2007, down 5% from 2006 and 43% from 1993. Total morning viewership in 2007 averaged 12.7 million, a drop of 4% from 2006.

•    The average audience for nightly cable news doubled to 2.7 million people from 1998 to 2007.

•    The median age of viewers of evening network news was 61 years old in 2007.

•    Sunday morning talk shows have an estimated combined viewership of about 10 million people. This audience tends to be politically engaged - journalists, financial donors to political candidates and political activists.

•    Univision is the largest Spanish-language broadcaster and the fifth largest network in the nation.

ONLINE    Journalists are turning to blogs in record numbers.

•    More than half of journalists read blogs: according to a Columbia University survey of 1,202 U.S. journalists in 2005, 51% of journalists use blogs regularly and 28% rely on blogs for daily reporting.

•    As of February 2008, over 112 million blogs existed and over 175,000 blogs were created every day worldwide.  Yet, only a few websites attract most of the blog readership.

•    The top political blogs are The Huffington Post and Daily Kos.  Readers of political blogs are more likely to be college-educated men with a higher income than the general public and a median age of 49, which is older than internet users in general. This audience also leans liberal.

•    About 37% of Americans get news regularly on the internet, up from 22% in 2000.  The top online news websites are Yahoo News (32.6 million unique visitors a month), MSNBC.com (29.2 million), CNN.com (29.1 million) and AOL News (20 million). 

•    As of March 2007, more than half (57%) of internet adult users had watched videos online. 

•    Video sharing websites such as YouTube affect the news world by providing alternative distribution media for citizen-generated news. Social networking websites are also news platforms: QuePasa.com recently introduced the first online Latino Citizen Journalism News Channel.

NEWS MEDIA AND LATINOS    TV is the predominant source of news for this audience.

•    Roughly 88 % of Latinos get news from network television, 82% from local television, 58% from radio, 52% from newspapers, and 29% from the Internet.

•    A growing number of Latinos in the United States switch between English and Spanish to get their news. Even fluent English speakers rely on Spanish-language media for news about Latino communities.

•    U.S. Latino voters rely more on English-language news media: 53% gets news in English, while 40% gets news from media in both languages, and only 6% of likely voters get all their news in Spanish.

•    The news websites most visited by Latinos include Yahoo! News, AOL News, MSNBC and CNN.

OTHER

•    The not-for-profit cooperative Associated Press continues to grow and adapt to new technologies. AP currently staffs more than 3,000 journalists in 97 countries and recently established lucrative relationships with major online customers like Google News and Yahoo, receiving over $100 million in revenue from these sources.
 

TO GO   

The changing media landscape provides many opportunities to target key audiences. Upcoming issues of The Feed will detail how to work successfully with specific aspects of the “new communications” field, such as blogging and online news, television in the viral age, reaching Latino audiences, and more.

Stay tuned!

ABOUT NCI
Resource Media’s New Communications Initiative (NCI) is a program designed to increase and expand the understanding and application of new communications trends and technologies. NCI provides research and resources to help you and others in our broad community stay ahead of the curve.  The Feed comes out four to six times a year, and covers different aspects of today’s changing communications and media landscape. For more information or to subscribe, please contact Liza Pike at Liza@resource-media.org or (415) 397-5000 x307.

* All endnotes in PDF version of this document.