Saturday, June 13, 1998

News business broadens its 'net' of sources

In the communications world of late 20th century America, it's almost as if you can blink your eyes and miss something massive occurring, such as the increasing percentage of adults turning to the Internet at least once a week to catch up on the news.

A couple of years ago, it was 6 percent, or 11 million people. Today, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, it's 20 percent, or 33 million people.

This tripling of Internet news readers is only a little more astonishing than what's happening on TV. The cable news networks, which can now claim 60 percent of all adults as viewers when ESPN sports news and the weather channel are thrown in, have overtaken the major broadcast networks, which can claim 57 percent when you count the morning, afternoon and evening news shows. Some 68 percent of Americans still read newspapers regularly, the survey reports.

For some in the news business, these may seem like perilous, slippery times, and there is at least one bad sign for democracy in the Pew survey, the fact that young adults are less interested in news generally than their elders or than young adults were in the past. The positive side -- though some might complain of information overload -- is that there have never before been so many sources of news, so many ways to tune into what is happening this moment or to learn in depth about events of the day.

All of this has to be exciting for those who want to keep up with and understand the era in which they live, although even keeping up with what's happening in the communications industry itself seems to demand a steady gaze.