Pew Study: Americans Abandoning News Outlets, Citing Lower Quality - 0 views
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Nearly a third of those surveyed, or 31%, said they had ceased relying on a particular news outlet because it no longer provided them with the sort of news they were used to getting.
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To learn exactly what respondents meant by that, Pew asked whether the issue was quantity — ie. fewer stories — or quality. Overwhelmingly, they chose the latter, with 60.7% citing “less complete” coverage as the reason for turning away, versus 23.5% who chose “fewer stories.”
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Yet as sensitive as they are to the declining quality of news, Americans aren’t particularly perceptive about the financial pressures underlying the trend. A full 60% said they knew nothing whatsoever (36%) or very little (24%) about the economic forces disrupting the news business, although awareness was somewhat higher among the affluent and educated.
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Curiously, even among those who claimed to know at least a little about the situation, a majority of 57% didn’t believe news outlets’ economic woes limited their ability to produce quality coverage.
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With newspaper newsrooms employing 28% fewer journalists than they did in 2001 (fewer than 40,000 nationally), that’s a bizarre finding. How could anyone, you might wonder, not see the link between a dramatic reduction in the number of people producing the news and the thoroughness of that product?
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Consumers are sending a message: They want the same quality of news they’ve always known, not excuses, and they’ll punish news outlets that fail to meet that standard by taking their business elsewhere.
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"Like all vicious cycles, the relationship between the declining fortunes of news outlets and the shrinking of their audiences is a difficult one to untangle, a chicken-and-egg problem. Newspaper circulations have been sliding for decades, starting well before digital media started siphoning off ad dollars and forcing widespread newsroom cutbacks that, inevitably, resulted in a poorer editorial product."