Pew identifies 4 news audience groups

Pew has named four news audience groups, based on their use of traditional and digital media to keep up to date with the news. Which one are you?

by Helen Leggatt

Are you one of the Disengaged? Probably not, if you’re reading this. Perhaps, then, you are a Net-Newser that relies on the Internet to feed your news consumption?

Disengaged and Net-Newser are just two of four “distinct segments in today’s news audience”, according to a new Pew Research Center report. While traditional media sources, such as television and newspapers, continue to dominate, online media is gaining traction.

According to the 129-page Pew report (.pdf), “For more than a decade, the audiences for most traditional news sources have steadily declined, as the number of people getting news online has surged. A sizable minority of Americans find themselves at the intersection of these two long-standing trends in news consumption."

Increasingly, the young and Internet savvy, Net-Newsers (13%) are going online to get their daily dose of news, many choosing the digital versions of traditional media such as The New Yorker and the BBC. Meanwhile, the oldest and largest news audience, Traditionalists (46%), continue to consult the television for their main, and often only, source of news.

The group Pew deems the most demographically sought-after is the Integrators (23%). While they still use television as their main source of news, Integrators graze on on- and offline sources.

Of course, there are always those that really aren’t very interested in the news – whether on the television on online. These, the Disengaged, make up 14% of audiences and just under half of this group consumes no news, on any day, from any source.