(Rich Gordon)

In the latest research from the Readership Institute, what should we make of the findings that 62 percent of Americans have never visited their local newspaper's Web site?

Maybe they don't know about the ways these sites have become more timely and dynamic, featuring regular news updates, user comments and various new features. Or maybe they just don't feel connected to their local communities, so they gravitate to national sites (CNN.com or USAToday.com), aggregators like Google and Yahoo!, or default home pages (like those provided by Internet service providers).

A new book, "Post-Broadcast Democracy," by Markus Prior of Princeton University, offers a more persuasive answer: The core audience for news just isn't that big.

I am still working my way through Prior's rigorous, scholarly analysis - as a summary, I recommend this 18-page paper he wrote for a Harvard symposium earlier this year. But I'm already finding it most helpful in interpreting some of the realities of today's online publishing world.

Prior's book seeks to understand and explain how greater media choice affects people's interest in, and understanding of, politics. He focuses especially on people's preferences for news and entertainment. To measure these preferences, he conducted surveys about media alternatives.

For instance, he showed respondents a list of 10 programming genres (news, sports, game shows, music videos, documentaries, reality TV, soap operas, dramas, comedies and science fiction) and had them choose their top four in order. News ranks first for just 5 percent of respondents, second for 11 percent and third for 14 percent. In other words, based on this metric, less than a third of Americans consider news among their three favorite TV programming genres.

Perhaps this is not a fair estimation of the total core audience for news - certainly there are people who are heavy news consumers in print while gravitating toward entertainment on TV. But whatever the size of the news audience, Prior's book makes a compelling case that the arrival of greater media choice (via cable TV and, more recently, the Internet) is having dramatic - and unforeseen - effects on news consumption.

With access to cable and the Internet, the people Prior calls "news junkies" consume more news than ever. For instance, he finds that time spent viewing national TV news (including broadcast and cable networks) more than doubled in the average household between the mid-1990s and 2004. But that growth conceals a more complicated reality. The rise in news consumption is due solely to the news junkies.

Among people with a preference for entertainment, cable TV and the Internet just make it easier to avoid the news - and that's what they do. When most of the TV audience was shared among just three networks, many people acquired the habit of watching the network or local news. Now, the entertainment seekers simply go elsewhere.

"Fewer people watch more news," Prior writes. He ultimately estimates that just about 10-15 percent of Americans are news junkies.

Prior explores the implications of these findings by assessing people's knowledge of current affairs and their voting behavior. He finds that with the advent of more media choices, news junkies become more knowledgeable about current affairs and more likely to vote. But people who prefer entertainment know less and vote less frequently.

Two other interesting findings in Prior's book:

• In a high-choice media environment, interest in news doesn't relate very closely to socioeconomic status - a characteristic that scholars historically found would predict media usage and political knowledge. In other words, news junkies can be found across the socioeconomic spectrum.


• News junkies are more partisan than those who prefer entertainment - perhaps explaining the apparent growth in partisanship in government and election campaigns.

For news organizations on the Web, Prior's book suggests the need for a two-tier content approach. For news junkies, you should publish more news than ever - and the Web makes that possible. But to reach the much larger audience of people who prefer entertainment to news, you'll need to offer entertainment-oriented content and services.

This really isn't so different from what newspapers have historically provided to readers: a mix of news and entertainment. On the Web, though, newspapers have clearly emphasized news first. Which is a big part of the reason why so few people visit newspaper Web sites.


By Rich Gordon (richgor-at-northwestern.edu)
Rich Gordon is Associate Professor and Director of Digital Technology in Education at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.