Trends in News Consumption: Online Becoming More Popular

Are your members more USA TODAY types, New York Times types, or The Atlantic types? It may matter a lot for your association’s publication, based on a new study about media consumption.

The Pew study, “Trends in News Consumption: 1991-2012  (opens in a new tab),” shows that 55 percent of respondents get their news from TV on an average day, but online news is quickly closing in, jumping from 29 percent to 39 percent between 2006 and 2012 and leapfrogging newspapers and radio news.

And trends, overall, aren’t in favor of magazines, with 17 percent of people in 2012 saying they read a print magazine the prior day. While still a smaller decline than for newspapers, the number nonetheless dropped by 6 percent between 2006 and 2012.

“The decline of print on paper spans beyond just newspapers,” the study says.

But that said, the trends varied significantly based on the type of magazine or publication. A sample below:

Other trends from the study: Apparently Twitter, which has a reputation for breaking news, isn’t really all that popular for news consumption, at least compared with other social networks.

“Just 11% ever see news on Twitter, while 3% got news there yesterday,” the study says. Comparatively, “nearly half of adults (47%) ever get news on Facebook and other social networking sites and 19% got news on one or more of those sites yesterday.”

How do you — or your association members — acquire information? And how important is it to keep up? Read the full study online.  (opens in a new tab)

(TMG archive photo)