“Most Americans (69%) say that if their local newspaper no longer existed, it would not have a major impact on their ability to keep up with information and news about their community.”

Woah.

This information is from a report by Pew Internet and The American Life Project. Basically the report polled a group of American’s to find out how they gather news about their local communities. The report found that more and more audiences (especially more ‘tech-savvy’, younger audiences – they said it, not me) are moving away from television and print news in preference of online sources. The numbers they’re talking about  are significant. 

Yet according to the same report, “Newspapers (primarily print) rank first or tie for first as the sources people rely on most for 11 of the 16 different kinds of local information asked about – more topics than any other media source.” The topics included in these categories include government, taxes and civic affairs which I know I would class as ‘news’.

So these are the topics American’s are following less. Can we presume that Australian’s are following suit?

A study by a group of master’s students at the University of Queensland made these findings:

“Seventy-five per cent of the sample identified themselves as Internet users. Nearly 46% of these (or about one third of the sample) were using the Internet for news (9% of them had been doing this for one year or less and 57% had at least three years’ experience with online news). 

“Nearly seven in ten of those using online news did it frequently (28% several times a week and 41% every day). A 95% confidence interval reveals that as of August 2004, between 30% and 37% of the Australian population were using the Internet for news. 

“Compared to the fact that only 22% of the same sample (or from 19.2% to 25.2% of the population) subscribed to a pay television service, this suggests that the Internet can be seen as having become a major news source in Australia.”

These were only preliminary findings as there hasn’t been a lot of research into internet news consumption in Australia; however it’s interesting to note that most of the group that were polled used online newspaper sites as their main internet news sources – there’s hope yet!