Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
Dow Jones negotiates AI usage agreements with nearly 4,000 news publishers
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
Oct. 6, 2016, 12:27 p.m.
Audience & Social
LINK: www.pewresearch.org  ➚   |   Posted by: Ricardo Bilton   |   October 6, 2016

Digital publishers may be pouring time and energy into cranking up their video operations, but for a lot of their potential viewers, text is still the way to go.

New data from Pew Research finds that, when it comes to the news, younger adults still prefer words over moving images. While 46 percent of Americans overall say they prefer to watch the news over reading it, that number is far lower for Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 — only 38 percent of that group named video as their preferred news consumption format. In contrast, 42 percent said that they actually prefer text (which they prefer to read online, of course). Just 19 percent of young adults named listening as their preference. (“Smelling the news” was not an option.)

ft_16_09_30_newsbyage

Those preferences put young people at odds with those between 50 and 64 and those over 65, of which 52 percent and 58 percent, respectively, said they prefer to watch the news. Less than thirty percent of people in both those age groups said the same for text.

These generational gaps in news consumption preferences join similar findings from back in July, when Pew reported that 54 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds said that they prefer to get their news online — significantly higher than, say, the 38 percent of those ages 30 to 49, or the 15 percent of those ages 50 to 64 who said the same.

The lack of unhindered enthusiasm among young people for watching news online is probably sobering for digital publishers, many of which are eyeing video as a way to escape their reliance on display advertising, which seems in irrevocable decline.

But the challenges facing digital news video have been clear for some time. Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found in July that people don’t exactly flock to video when big news stories hit: “So far, the growth around online video news seems to be largely driven by technology, platforms, and publishers rather than by strong consumer demand,” Antonis Kalogeropoulos, one of the report’s authors, said in a statement at the time.

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
Dow Jones negotiates AI usage agreements with nearly 4,000 news publishers
Earlier this year, the WSJ owner sued Perplexity for failing to properly license its content. Now its research tool Factiva has negotiated its own AI licensing deals.
Back to the bundle
“If media companies can’t figure out how to be the bundlers, other layers of the ecosystem — telecoms, devices, social platforms — will.”
Religious-sounding language will be everywhere in 2025
“A great deal of language that looks a lot like Christian Nationalism isn’t actually calling for theocracy; it is secular minoritarianism pushed by secular people, often linked to rightwing cable and other media with zero meaningful ties to the church or theological principle.”