As we wrote last week, the audience of America’s “legacy media” is definitely getting greyer–just check all the ads for Geritol, Depends, Fix-O-Dent, Viagra, Levitra, et al. It’s not your father’s TV news–it’s more like your grandfather’s.
Where are the younger viewers going? Right here. Well, not all of them to us of course–but to the Internet as a whole:
The number of online adults who prefer the Internet as their main source of news has grown by over 35 percent in the last four years, at the expense of television and newspapers, a market research firm said Tuesday.
Currently, more than 26 percent of online adults prefer the Internet for national and international news, compared with 19 percent in 2001, JupiterResearch, a division of Jupitermedia Corp., said.
Consumer surveys also show that althought preferences grow for the Internet, the overall number of online adults using the medium for daily news has remained flat over the last few years, hovering around 50 percent, the research firm said. The number of online adults preferring to use the Internet for local news is also growing, but has yet to exceed 10 percent.
Driving the preference trend are young adults between the ages of 18 and 24. A third of this group prefers the Internet as their primary source of news, while 40 percent prefer TV and 10 percent newspapers.
In a recent column, George Will was all over the implications of that last figure.
Update: Glenn Reynolds’ latest Tech Central Station column has some interesting and related thoughts on this topic.
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