On Monday, the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) released its annual “State of the News Media” study.  The study covers a lot of ground, providing data about readership/viewership, ad revenues, ownership, journalism jobs, and content across every news medium, be it print, broadcast or digital. During the next few weeks, we’ll be diving deeper into the data, bringing you our analysis of how all this research can inform the media reform movement.

The increasing dominance of the Internet as a news platform gets a lot of attention in the study. Let’s take a look at some of the media policy implications of what they found.

Local News Goes Mobile

According to the study, 2010 marked the tipping point for online news consumption, with more Americans accessing local news online than via print newspaper. This shift is due in no small part to the increased use of mobile devices to access local news and information; 47% of adults now get some local news on their mobile device.

Unfortunately, the PEJ study doesn’t shed light on a key question related to online news access: is the local news people consume online produced by traditional media outlets, such as local newspapers and TV stations, or are online news readers relying on original digital news sources, such as hyper local blogs?

Other statistics suggest that increases in online news consumption do not change the fact that traditional media outlets still produce the vast majority of news content accessed by readers -- they’re just providing it through a new platform. According to Nielsen, the top five visited news sites in 2010 were: Yahoo! News Websites, CNN Digital Network, MSNBC Digital Network, AOL News, and NYTimes.com. (It’s worth noting that two of these sites are news aggregators; while not traditional news outlets themselves, the content they aggregate tends to be drawn from traditional sources.  In 2010, 96% of Yahoo News top stories came through aggregation, while 4% came from Yahoo staff.)

How people access local news content is important to understanding the news ecosystem -- however, the sources from which people get their news has even greater media policy implications. Data that addresses this question would paint a clearer picture of the role of news sources, as opposed to platforms, in local media landscapes.

Second Class Digital Citizens

This rapidly increasing reliance on the Internet, and specifically on wireless devices, for access to news, underscores the importance of strong Net Neutrality protections. The FCC’s weak Net Neutrality rules, adopted in December 2010, give wireless internet service providers the leeway to limit access to local news and information on our phones. That's especially troubling for African American and Latino communities who increasingly access the Internet, and local news, via mobile devices. According to demographic information in the study, Hispanic mobile device users are accessing local news online at significantly higher rates than whites. 62% of Hispanic mobile device owners get local news on their device, compared to 53% of whites. Similarly, 21% of Hispanic users have an app for local news and information, compared to just 12% of whites.  

These trends demonstrate that the threat of pay-for-play news disproportionately affects communities of color. Without Net Neutrality protections against discrimination on wireless Internet, mobile device users (and specifically young people of color) could find themselves less able to access local news and information that is vital for democratic participation.

More to Come

The State of the News Media study is chock full of findings that provide insight into many areas of our media reform work at Free Press. Stay tuned for a series of blog posts breaking down the study. Up next: the down-low on local TV news.