Survey Says: Where we get our News

A new survey of nearly 5,000 Americans sheds some light on where we get our news.

Comparing 2017 to 2016, we see some slippage and some increases.

Not surprising to me is that the increases are related to our pocket computers, those devices you and I call our smartphones.

News Websites or Apps grew 8% in the past year and is now tied with Local TV which lost the most ground (7%)

Social Media grew slightly too by 3%.

I was happy to see that local radio news is still strong in the survey, as I work for WOWO radio, our local news talk radio station.  There was another talk station in town but they switched format this month to rock music.  And we have our local NPR affiliate that provides news and talk too, but has a fraction of the listenership that WOWO has.

(WOWO’s website also gets the most visits of all our Federated Media stations, company wide, so we are on top of that trend too.)

Also on the survey, was cable TV news like CNN, MSNBC, Fox News; national TV news like ABC, CBS and NBC; and print newspapers, but all showed year to year declines.

None of this is surprising to me.  What does surprise me is the local businesses that continue to use some of these media for advertising.  But I’ll talk about that some other day.  I’ve written a couple stories recently about local news changes in the Fort Wayne area and also about the status of radio listenership locally.  You can click on those links if you missed them.

Which reminds me, the phone book arrived this week.  My wife took care of it before I got home.  I found it in the recycling bin waiting to be hauled away on trash day.