More People Turning To Online News

By WebProNews
Staff Writer
Article Date: 2005-03-07

During the 2004 presidential campaign, six times as many people used the internet to get political news as they did in 1996.

The amount of people using newspapers for their political news on the other hand, went down. A survey shows that 18% of adults in America used the Internet as one of two main sources of news about the presidential races. In 1996, only 3% made that claim. TV reliance went up from 72% to 78%.

The influence of newspapers dropped to 39 percent last year, from 60 percent in 1996, according to the joint, telephone-based survey from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Nonetheless, Americans who got campaign news over the Internet were more likely to visit sites of major news organizations like CNN and the New York Times (43 percent) rather than Internet-only resources such as candidate Web sites and Web journals, known as blogs (24 percent).