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How Americans Get TV News at Home
http://www.journalism.org/2013/10/11/how-americans-get-tv-news-at-home/
Almost three out of four U.S. adults (71%) watch local television news and 65% view network newscasts over the course of a month, according to Nielsen data from February 2013. While 38% of adults watch some cable news during the month, cable viewers—particularly the most engaged viewers—spend far more time with that platform than broadcast viewers do with local or network news.
Although these data are from 2013, checking TV ratings shows little change. People are getting their news in higher numbers from local and alphabet network broadcasts than from cable news channels. This report notes that people watch cable news longer than broadcast news, but it is the numbers that interest me. Viewership for local and network news is far higher than for the aggregate of cable news programming. This has great significance for political campaigns and explains why so much money is pumped into advertising on local and national broadcast TV news schedules.
Personally, I watch local and national news on our local CBS affiliate, WCCO. My wife and I have it on over coffee in the morning and for an hour in the evening. Local news is important to us, because it affects our daily lives. National TV news hits the highlights of events both from the day before in the AM and from the current day in the late afternoon. We don't actually watch any cable news programming. I do have the radio on in my home office, tuned to WCCO-AM, primarily for the hourly and half-hourly news briefings. I often am able to post breaking news on DU because of that.
Cable news channels spend a great deal of time in news analysis, and much less on actual hard news programming. I'm able to do my own analysis, so that's not of interest to me. What I want, and pretty much get from my local and national network coverage is a regular precis of the days events. That's what I"m looking for. DU is my other source of news information. There's plenty of analysis here, to be sure.
Just something of interest about how people get news today.
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