Online Audience - 2006 Annual Report

How does choice of subjects among online readers compare with those among newspaper readers ?

Perhaps because online news competes with so many other activities that can be performed while one is “logged on,” users seem to gravitate to different topics here than they do when reading a print newspaper.

Surveys in 2003 and 2004 of daily print newspaper readers by Mediamark Research, Inc. found that the most read sections of the newspaper include general news (60%), sports (36%), the editorial page (37%), business and finance (35%), the classified pages (32%), and movie listings and reviews (27%).39

To get a sense of how those figures compare with online choices, we looked at the habits of regular users, in this case those who said they had gone online “yesterday.” The most recent data suggest that they are accessing something quite different online than they do in print. The types of news they go online regularly for include general news (30%), news or information about politics and the campaign (18%) , information about movies (13%), sports scores (11%) , financial information (8%) , and classified ads on sites like craigslist (6%).

Merely occasional online consumption, meanwhile, more closely resembles daily newspaper reader habits. The most recent data available from the Pew Internet and American Life Project showed that 73% of occasional online users say they had looked for “information about movies, music, books, or other leisure activities”; 72% had at some time read general “news”; 44% had gone online to “get financial information, such as stock quotes or mortgage interest rates”; 43% said they had gone online to “check sports scores or information” and 36% ha d used “online classified ads or sites like craigslist to sell or buy items, find a job, or meet other people online.”40