2005 Annual Report - Online Audience

When Are People Going Online to Read News?

Another change the Internet has created is turning news consumption into an all-day activity for a large number of Americans. We mentioned that pattern in last year's report, and there was evidence in 2004 that it continued to grow.

Before the Internet, news consumption tended to be confined to three distinct time periods, the morning, around the dinner hour, and late at night. The Web made it possible - and socially acceptable - for people to get updated news throughout the day, particularly at work. In May and June of 2004, the Pew Research Center found that nearly three quarters (73%) of the public typically gets news during the day, up twelve percentage points since 2002 (61%).21

What Are People Reading Online?

When people say they get news online, do we know what they mean? Is it news about Iraq, or teenage pop singers like Ashlee Simpson?

While the Web sites people are turning to may have changed a bit over the year, the kinds of information users are searching for has remained roughly the same. It also appears to be quite similar to the kinds of news people get from traditional news media.

While most surveys just ask if people go online for news - and leave the definition of news to the imagination of the person being surveyed - there was at least one major attempt in 2004 to get more specific. It came in the biennial news consumption survey of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

Weather, always among the top reasons people consume more traditional news, is at the top in online news consumption as well. Fully three-quarters (76%) of online news users go online for weather. The next most-sought news is science and health, at 58%, followed by political and international news, 54% each.22

Types of News Topics

What role do photo images have? In the period immediately following the murder of American contract workers in Fallujah, the Abu Ghraib prison-torture photos, and the beheading of Nicholas Berg, a quarter of the public (24%) went online to view graphic war images from Iraq that mainstream newspapers and television generally considered too harsh to display, according to The Pew Internet & American Life Project.23

Another wrinkle is video images. When Reuters put up a section of raw video called Reuters Raw in March 2003, tens of thousand of people watched unedited streaming video of big events like developments in Iraq. Those viewers, Reuters reported, said they preferred seeing what's "really" happening unfiltered by editors. That raises various tough questions, including whether it's appropriate to help terrorists who want to produce horrifying images. And the issue will only intensify with the growth of broadband, which can make it possible for people to search for video in the same way that today they can search for keywords of text.24