Tuesday, September 21, 2010

All the News that's Fit to Read

Pew's latest study on news consumption came out last week and there are some interesting findings:
  • About a third of Americans go online to get their news and that's a little higher than those who get their news from papers
  • People aren't replacing more traditional news content with digital, they're supplementing it
That last point made me think back to a story I remember hearing when I was a communication undergrad. I remember one of my professors saying how there was a fear when television first came out that people would stop going to the movies. It turns out that fear was ultimately misplaced. I wonder if the same will bear out for TV news and newspapers in this digital age. I think as long as there is a niche that those media can fill that is different from digital, they will survive. The question is: Can they find that niche?