Newsroom With A View

(Originally posted on Sept. 13, 2010)

The good news: Americans are spending more time with the news. People say they spend 70 minutes getting news from various sources, the Pew Research Center says, the highest amount of time reported since the mid-1990s. From there, though, the news is a little murky except that news seen on digital platforms is taking off.

And there is unambiguous bad news for printed newspapers: While 26 percent of all Americans say they read a print newspaper yesterday, that figure falls to just 8 percent among adults younger than 30. And, as you can see in the chart above, people spend less time with the newspaper than with the other media options they have.

And an interesting note: 33 percent regularly use search engines to get news on topics of interest, up from 19 percent in 2008. That points up the growing importance of making sure you are writing online headlines with search engines in mind — and making sure you understand how search engines work.

UPDATE: Related to the search engine note above, during a conference call of news directors today Jason Clough of WNCN pointed out the importance of adding tags to videos posted to YouTube. During coverage of Hurricane Earl, the first videos the station loaded to YouTube weren’t getting much traffic, but once staffers started adding every tag they could think of that people might use to find Earl video, the viewer stats shot way up. (WNCN posts its video to YouTube, by the way, because linking to the YouTube video from Facebook makes the video viewable on mobile devices, while sometimes video posted directly to Facebook is not viewable on some mobile devices. Good tip to remember.)