from the New York Times
July 27, 1998
MEDIA
Identifying the Audience for Online News
By FELICITY BARRINGER
When news of the gunfire in the Capitol building swept the country
on Friday afternoon, a familiar ritual began. The Internet news
rush was on.
At Cable News Network's Web site servers running at 25 percent of
capacity saw a surge to nearly 100 percent five minutes after the
shooting. A similar flood engulfed msnbc.com.
Reading All About It Online
The Internet is becoming a more important source of information,
according to a recent survey of where Americans get their news.
[INLINE]
Source: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press
The New York Times
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All afternoon, as the reports grew more detailed -- the deaths of
two members of the Capitol police force, the emergency medical
treatment given to the gunman by Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., a heart
surgeon -- people kept checking in.
And maybe, while they were there, they checked on how well their
stock portfolios had come out at the end of a rocky week, or looked
at the reviews of "Saving Private Ryan," or monitored the weather
report to see how things were in the mountains where they were
going on vacation.
Like a photograph developing in the darkroom, the identity and
habits of Internet news audiences is not changing so much as it is
becoming clearer with every new crisis and every new computer user.
By and large, it is made up of younger men with college degrees and
professional jobs. They check in on the news from work, not home,
and even if they are drawn into a site by a crisis, they stay
around to pursue very particular individual interests.
More than anything else, "it's the big, big story that brings them
in," said Merrill Brown, editor in chief of msnbc.com. Second in
popularity is "stuff with utility" -- individualized stock
portfolios, reviews, listings, health and science news. The
sure-fire draw, he said, is a story about something that touches
both -- like a sharp shift in stock market prices. "That's where
you're more likely to get people the other media don't get."
But the biggest difference between the Internet and other news
outlets, from newspapers and magazines to cable and network
television to radio, is that Internet news is read less often over
morning coffee and more often over eat-at-your-desk takeout food.
News -- the stuff of the morning newspaper, the evening newscast
and drive-time all-news radio -- is now the stuff of the workplace.
"It's a huge difference," said Scott Woelfel, editor in chief of
cnn.com. "Until recently, the only news that penetrated into the
workplace was radio. Now they go in and spend what could be hours
during the day" checking into the news.
"It's no surprise they don't watch the nightly news when they go
back," he added. "They heard or read all those stories hours
before."
According to a survey last month from the Pew Research Center for
the People and the Press, one American in five goes online to get
the news at least once a week -- 15 percent of all women and 25
percent of all men. Two years ago, the overall figure was 6
percent. Some 35 percent of college graduates get their news from
the Internet at least once a week; 47 percent of college graduates
under the age of 30 do.
In the absence of a big breaking story, what these people are
looking for, the Pew study indicates, is information about hobbies,
movies or restaurants (82 percent), science and health (64
percent), technology (60 percent) and finance (52 percent). Low in
the rankings was local news (28 percent).
This makes sense, based on a recent study by the Newspaper
Association of America. It shows that 63 percent of those surveyed
regularly watch local television stations, more than use any other
medium. Internet news audiences don't try to find out about crimes
and fires and political squabbles while they are at their
computers. Why bother, when you can get it that night on
television?
Still, just 7 percent of the news audience regularly gets its news
from the Internet, according to the association's survey, which
shows 51 percent regularly reading newspapers, 49 percent listening
to radio and 42 percent regularly watching national television
news. But different people are clearly gravitating to different
media. The Pew survey found that just 22 percent of men under the
age of 30 regularly watch network news, compared with 55 percent of
women over the age of 50.
Yet even if Internet news sites draw but a small fraction of news
consumers, it is a fraction advertisers might find desirable. More
than 200,000 subscribers are paying up to $49 to read The Wall
Street Journal Interactive Edition, according to the publication's
managing editor, Rich Jaroslovsky. About two-thirds of that group,
he said, "don't read The Wall Street Journal in print." The
interactive subscribers tend to be younger than the readers of the
broadsheet, he said ("40ish rather than 50ish"), and four of five
are male.
The New York Times on the Web, which never charged domestic
subscribers and this month dropped the fee for overseas
subscriptions, now has about 4 million registered users, 77 percent
of them men, according to Richard Meislin, the editorial director.
About 73 percent are college-educated and 55 percent have household
incomes greater than $50,000. The educational and income profiles
of msnbc.com's audience are similar -- 74 percent college-educated,
62 percent with household incomes of more than $55,000.
Home consumption of online news is also rising, according to the
Web rating services Media Metrix and Relevant Knowledge. But even
at home, the audience is most often male; the favorite subject,
computers. The top news-related sites feature technology news:
Media Metrix ranks cnet.com, a computer-related site, highest,
above zdnet.com, the site of the Ziff-Davis Inc. technology news
magazines. Relevant Knowledge has zdnet ranked on top.
"For us, the peaks are when there is sexy technology news," said
Jai Singh, the editor of Cnet's news.com site. The Capitol shooting
didn't cause a big spike in the audience numbers; Thursday's Senate
hearings on Microsoft's business practices did. "If Bill Gates is
in the news, it makes it big time," Singh said, with a nod to the
chief executive of Microsoft.
The increase in the online news audience, with its idiosyncratic
tastes, may arguably be helping cable news cut into the network
news audience. But it is not cutting into the time spent with
traditional media. Internet news junkies, apparently, are also just
plain news junkies. The Pew study reported, "Those who go online
for news tend to spend more time than those who do not reading a
newspaper or watching television news."
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
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