What kind of news do people want?
Not celebrity scandals, despite the evidence of numerous US newscasts. Unfortunately, people aren't much interested in foreign news or science news either. And, even worse, fewer people are interested in news at all than they were 10 years ago.
Here's a quick summary of the results of a recent study by the Pew Research Center for People & the Press:
[Table and Data: Pew Research Center for People & the Press]
What I find really interesting is that very little has changed over the two decades of news coverage included in the study. Other than a big increase of public interest in stories about money, and a big loss of interest in stories about disasters, peoples' interests in the news now are remarkably similar to what they were in the mid-1980s. This is, of course, despite news media apologists who always say that they're 'just giving the public what it wants' whenever critics complain about the current state of print and broadcast news in the US.
The Columbia Journalism Review has a nice summary of the Pew Institute's findings
here. You can look at the Pew study in detail
over here.
Labels: Journalism, News media, Studies
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Posted by Magpie at 12:01 AM |
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