America Prefers Online News Over Newspapers

The newspaper publishing industry in general has been having an extremely difficult time financially over the last decade and a current report shows that news hungry consumers are turning more and more to online services such as news aggregators such as Google News and AOL.

"Americans have become news grazers both on and offline - but within limits," said Amy Mitchell, deputy director for the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism."They generally don't have one favourite website but also don't search aimlessly. Most online news consumers regularly draw on just a handful of different sites."

Besides aggregators large news sites such as CNN and BBC are also popular, and the newspapers which are struggling to remain relevant are still, for a large part, trying to find themselves online and make it profitable.

I'm definitely an online news guy, with the exception of the weekends where I like thumbing through the Saturday edition of the Globe and Mail. I think it's more of a tradition than anything else, or perhaps its a small break from the randomness in which we consume news online. The usual routine of skimming article titles and following  links which take me from site to site is replaced by a leisurely turn of the page consuming nearly every article front to back. It's sort of nostalgic but doesn't lend it's self to the fast pace of the week days.

Source: BBC News Online via rss :)

Newspaper or online news?

A survey conducted by British news publishers asked readers of web sites run by traditional news media whether they also purchase hard copies of the paper. The good news for the newspaper publishers is that 80% of the online readers also bought their paper. It appears as though there is a fine line to walk with how much content from the more profitable print media goes into the publisher's web site. If the newspaper ignores the web they are missing out on the growing ad revenues online, but if they publish too much of the content they risk losing readers who pay for their paper to the free web site. See the story at The Register. For the record I usually purchase The Globe and Mail, which I read at the local coffee shop and leave for another patron to enjoy once I've finished... I usually write this sites URL on it next to articles I intend to blog about, shameless self promotion perhaps but it's only fair it was my dollar!