Gallup just released the latest in their trends on news consumption patterns. There's a lot to debate about these poll measures, but they do provide one indicator among many about what might be going on with audiences. In fact, these numbers are best compared for reliability against the annual Pew Center for the People and the Press news consumption surveys and other sources.
According to Gallup, local TV news continues to dominate as an information source for Americans, with 55% reporting that they tune into the medium every day. This pattern has held steady for the past ten years.
However, since 2002, regular Network TV news and Cable TV news viewing has declined to 35% and 34% of Americans respectively. I would like to see these trends go back further than 2002. At that time, following the September 11 attacks and the invasion of Afghanistan, news consumption surged. So the decline in 2006 may just reflect a "normalization" in media behaviors.
For local NP reading, the good news is that trends appear to hold stable at 44% of Americans reading the paper everyday. Meanwhile, the growth in Internet news use appears to have leveled off a bit, with just less than a quarter of Americans getting their news from this source on a regular basis.
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