More people get news online now than they do from newspapers.
That’s according to Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual “State of the Media” report published on Monday.
The Internet was the number two platform behind television in terms of adult news consumption — with 46 percent saying they get news online at least three times a week, surpassing newspapers (40 percent) for the first time. Only local TV news is a more popular platform in America now (50 percent) than the Web, and “the trend line shows that gap closing.”
According to PEJ, online ad revenue in 2010 is projected to surpass print newspaper ad revenue for the first time, too.
More highlights from the report:
>> Newspapers were the only medium to suffer continued revenue declines last year. An estimated 1,000 to 1,500 more newsroom jobs were lost last year — meaning newspaper newsrooms are 30 percent smaller than in 2000.”
>> Nearly half of all Americans (47 percent) now get some form of local news on a mobile device.
>> Advertising revenues at newspapers fell by 6.4 percent in 2010, compared to a 26 percent drop in 2009. Overall, newspaper ad revenue is down 48 percent in the last four years.
>> For the first time, more money was spent on online advertising than on print newspaper advertising. Overall, online advertising overall grew 13.9 percent to $25.8 billion in 2010.
>> “The problem for news is that by far the largest share of that online ad revenue goes to non-news sources, particularly to aggregators.”
>> The audience for cable news fell 13.7 percent across the entire day in 2010. Prime-time (down 16 percent) fell even more.
>> For the first time in at least 12 years, every cable news channel lost viewership. CNN’s fell 37 percent in prime-time. Fox News fell 11 percent, while MSNBC declined 5 percent.
>> Despite declining audiences, revenues for each of the cable news channels were projected to increase in 2010 a total of 10.7 percent across the three networks.
>> Audiences for almost every network news program fell again in 2010. “Evening news audiences fell by 752,000 viewers, or 3.4 percent, from 2009 and have been on a downward trend for three decades.”
>> Local TV news stations were able to add audience at the “new early timeslot of 4:30 a.m.; stations in 69 cities had news that early, up from 28 a year earlier.”
>> Print circulation for newspapers continued to decline, though not as sharply as 2009. Weekday circulation fell 5 percent and Sunday fell 4.5 percent.
>> Of all the traditional media, the audience for AM/FM radio has remained among the most stable. A whopping 93 percent of Americans listened to AM/FM radio at some point during the week in 2010, according to data from Arbitron — a figure that’s dropped only three percentage points in the last decade.
>> NPR’s audience grew 3 percent in 2010, according to NPR internal data, to 27.2 million a week. That is up 58 percent since 2000.
