2005 Annual Report - Online Audience

Perhaps the most important aspect of online news is that it is attracting the most elusive news audience of all, the young.

The 2004 news consumption data reveal that what we have been watching for a generation is continuing: news consumption skews old, and the young consume newspapers and TV news less than their predecessors did at similar ages. In 2004, this was even the subject of a new book by an academic, David Mindich, called "Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News."

The Internet, however, challenges the notion that the young are uninterested. It is the exception to the idea of news consumption's being an older person's behavior, and this makes it the hope for growth of the overall news audience.

In fact, the young "regularly" go online for news as often as all other age groups, or more often. What's more, as of 2004 regular online news consumption among younger consumers appears to growing (it increased among every other age group as well). Fully 36% of young adults, people aged 18 to 29, reported going online regularly for news in spring 2004, up from 31% in 2002 and 30% in 2000, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. A different survey, from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, showed that in June of 2004, roughly seven in ten (71%) of Internet users 18 to 29 reported having "ever" gotten news online, up seven percentage points from just four months earlier.15

Thus the Internet explodes the notion that the young are uninterested in news. The interest of younger Americans in the presidential election may suggest the same thing. Younger Americans may be less interested in the way news is traditionally presented than they used to be. They may want the news they want, when they want it. That presents its own challenges, culturally and to industry. But it is different from apathy or disengagement.

The young also differ from their elders in the kinds of sites they visit. People 18 to 29 are more likely than the overall population to have gone to news sites in general. They are also more likely in particular to visit such sites as Yahoo! and AOL News (43% of 18-to-29-year-olds, 30% of the population over all). After these sites, young users seem most drawn to TV Web sites such as CNN.com and ABCNews.com (36% regularly or sometimes among those 18 to 29 versus 29% of the population over all), or major national newspaper Web sites (22% versus 20% over all). They are also more likely than the general population to go to national newspaper sites as well as both local newspaper and television Web sites.16