The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press released a new report yesterday about how Americans get news. I was not surprised to see the percentage of Americans that “read a newspaper” and “listened to radio news” declined during the past 10 years. Similarly, the fact that a third of Americans indicated that they “went online for news” was not unexpected.
Clearly, the way Americans access news has changed with the rise of the Internet and platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) highlighted the impact Twitter has had in news consumption in a recent blog post “Like it or not, Twitter is now a news medium.” As stated in that post, we have witnessed how news can break on Twitter (e.g. earthquake in New Zealand) or be used to follow a fast moving story (e.g. gas explosion in San Bruno, California).
However, what I did find interesting is that Americans are spending more time with the news overall. With “digital platforms playing a larger role in news consumption…”, “the average time Americans spend with the news on a given day is as high as it was in the mid-1990s, when audiences for traditional news sources were much larger” as a result.
The report also reveals that the public has an increasingly skeptical view of reporting from the major news organizations. Per the report, “No more than a third says they can believe all or most of the reporting by the major news organizations.”
As PR professionals it is not only important to understand how the public accesses news and what platforms are most popular, but also understand perceptions of the popular news outlets. At Communiqué PR we take an integrated approach with our clients, where we work with bloggers and non-traditional news outlets to establish credibility with target audiences and often, major news outlets can help amplify or broadcast information more broadly. If target audiences don’t find value in a particular news source, that is clearly going to impact who we build media relationships with and the strategies we develop to successfully distribute and elevate news with.
We will continue to monitor behaviors and perceptions to ensure our strategies and tactics take into consideration the realities of American’s preferences.