March 22, 2005

Numbers released by the Pew Internet & American Life project demonstrate different reasons why American adults used the Internet to read the news and access various information about past US elections.

For the third survey in a row, Pew found that convenience was the top reason US adults got their news online, with almost 60% of respondents citing it as a reason, compared to 33% who search for news on the Net because that they didn't get all the news they needed from traditional news sources.

This percentage had declined from 2002, when it was 43%, which is surprising since there is currently a heated debate on the Internet and in the news media about whether the "mainstream media" is has become fossilized, lazy, unreliable or irrelevant, while online news, often in the form of blogs or other Web sites, has become more investigative, imaginative and relevant.

The debate rages on, but for what it is worth, the survey indicates that many people do not feel that they have to go online to get all the news.

A survey focusing on the search engine habits of US Internet users by Harris Interactive and MSN, conducted in 2004, found that many online readers use the Web to find breaking news.

In fact, this "topic" was by far the most popular search, with war, terrorism, the 2004 Presidential election, economic news and celebrity news/scandals significantly behind.

Three-fourths of both men and women used the Internet for breaking news, but usage varied greatly for other types of news. Men were more likely to search for topics like war, terrorism, election and economic news, while women were more apt to search for news about celebrities and high profile trials.

A report by Nielsen/NetRatings from October 2004 showed that CNN, MSNBC and Yahoo! News all ranked as top Internet news destinations, with AOL News & Weather gaining popularity.

Newspaper-based Web sites tended to rank lower, even ones with non-regional affiliations, such as USA Today.

FoxNews ranked lower than the other network-tied sites, even though it has been a top-ranking TV news station for quite some time.

Google News, which aggregates news links from thousands of news sites, outpolled some news sites.

Clearly, sites like CNN and MSNBC benefit from Internet users thirst for breaking news, unlike newspaper-based sites, which do update their pages as breaking news occurs, but are more focused on longer reports and analysis of events, rather than up to the minute news like the TV-based news.

As the recent election cycle demonstrated, news stories now emerge from the Internet and move into newspapers and TV (indeed, this has been the case since the late 1990s), and some Internet users feel they should go straight to the source.

Despite the variety of news available online, however, the main appeal of Internet news is its ability to quickly update the latest stories.

Source: eMarketer