Seismic changes appear to be taking place in the information marketplace, and newspapers in particular seem ill-equipped to weather the storms. In my teen-aged and college years, television news was the pre-eminent source of information here in the US. If Walter Cronkhite didn't mention it, it wasn't part of "
the way it is" for most Americans.
These days it appears there is no dominant medium for information as traditional media like newspapers and television compete with aggregators like Yahoo! and Google and with blogs from a wide variety of commentators. Demographics also play a major role in fragmenting the audience for news with younger people like most of you here on AS relying more heavily on the Internet.
I'm especially interested in the intersection between these technological trends and the political context in which they occur. Do people in states with stricter government controls over media outlets turn more often to the Internet to get a less-biased view? If so, is that true of older citizens as well as younger ones?
I'll start this discussion with some
data from the US.
How about you? Do you rely more on the Internet for news than on other media? How about your parents? Why or why not?
Personally, I rely mostly on National Public Radio, the BBC on both radio and television, and The Economist.