The New News Landscape Is Omnipresent

To a great extent, people's experience of news, especially on the Internet, is becoming a shared social experience as people swap links in emails, post news stories on their social networking site feeds, highlight news stories in their Tweets and haggle over the meaning of events in discussion threads.

A new survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project aimed at understanding the new news landscape, reports that 56% of American adults say they follow the news "all or most of the time," and 25% follow the news at least "some of the time." 99% of American adults say that on a typical day, they get news from at least one of these media platforms: a local or national print newspaper, a local or national television news broadcast, radio or the Internet, and the Internet is now the third most popular news platform, behind local television news and national television news. The process Americans use to get news is based on foraging and opportunism, says the report. They access news when the spirit moves them or they have a chance to check up on headlines. At the same time, gathering the news is not entirely an open-ended exploration for consumers, even online where there are limitless possibilities for exploring news. Some 46% of Americans say they get news from four to six media platforms on a typical day. Just 7% get their news from a single media platform on a typical day.