People more dependant on Internet for news

Ravdeep Hora
CoolTechZone.com

The research also pointed out that reliance of news on the Internet has grown by six folds since 1996 around the Presidential election time.

18 percent of adults reportedly relied on Internet for their political news instead of a mere three percent in 1996. The television news reports also grew from 72 percent earlier to 78 percent. Unfortunately for numerous print magazines and newspapers, the growth of Internet is having quite an impact on their business models. The research study confirmed the decline of newspapers from 60 percent in 1996 to 39 percent last year.

Those (43 percent) who took the survey said they prefer to go to major news sites such as CNN, The New York Times and Reuters as opposed to their televised or print editions. 24 percent of the people said they also liked to visit the candidate’s campaign websites and journals even though they were fairly one-sided.

28 percent also said they usually went to news aggregations sites such as Yahoo News, Google News and America Online (AOL) News pages that tends to have links to thousands of possible news stories with an abundance of opinions and facts.

58 percent of Internet news readers said they used Internet news as a convenience. An approximately 33 percent of readers pointed out that they were not satisfied with the news delivered by newspapers. One of the reasons include that newspapers can only be printed once while news websites can be updated almost 24/7 depending upon the importance of news. 11 percent said Internet provided far more information that newspapers and televised programs weren’t able to cover. Many readers also liked to visit blogs, as they generated interesting conversations about the elections and even helped 40 percent of Internet news readers made up their minds about the candidates. 20 percent readers said the information helped them in one-way or another.

The study also found that many of the readers included minority groups interested in elections, such as women, older citizens, lower-income households and others.