Research

The percentage of women and people of color in TV newsrooms and in TV news management are at the highest levels ever measured by the RTDNA/Hofstra University Newsroom Survey. About a quarter (24.8%) of newsroom staffers are people of color--11.&% African American, 10.8% Hispanic or Latino, 2% Asian and .3% Native American. That is still well below minority representation in the population as a whole, which is about 38%. Highlights:

This toolkit provides background context for the Homework Gap, addresses broader implications of household connectivity, suggests resources for scoping the problem, and details five strategies districts are currently using to address these challenges: 1) Partner with Community Organizations to Create “Homework Hotspots”, 2) Promote Low-Cost Broadband Offerings, 3) Deploy Mobile Hotspot Programs, 4) Install Wifi on School Buses and 5) Build Private LTE Networks. In addition, it outlines four steps school leaders can take to collaborate with local governments and their community to take a bro

Since the 2016 US presidential election, much attention has been focused on the role of bots in promoting political news on Twitter. But bots can play a role in spreading many other types of news and information as well. This study finds that suspected bots are far more active in sharing links to news sites focusing on nonpolitical content than to sites with a political focus. Some findings:

In today’s fast-paced and complex information environment, news consumers must make rapid-fire judgments about how to internalize news-related statements – statements that often come in snippets and through pathways that provide little context. A new Pew Research Center survey examines a basic step in that process: whether members of the public can recognize news as factual – something that’s capable of being proved or disproved by objective evidence – or as an opinion that reflects the beliefs and values of whoever expressed it.

The relationship between technology platforms and news publishers has endured a fraught 18 months. Even so, the external forces of civic and regulatory pressure are hastening a convergence between the two at an accelerated rate beyond what we saw when we published our first report from this study in March 2017. Journalism has played a critical part in pushing for accountability into the practices of companies such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter, yet newsrooms are increasingly oriented toward understanding and leveraging platforms as part of finding a sustainable future.

Is bias in responsiveness to constituents conditional on the policy preferences of elected officials? The scholarly conventional wisdom is that constituency groups who do not receive policy representation still obtain some level of responsiveness by legislators outside of the policy realm. In contrast, we present a theory of preference-induced responsiveness bias where constituency responsiveness by legislators is associated with legislator policy preferences.

Since 2004, Pew Research Center has issued an annual report on key audience and economic indicators for a variety of sectors within the US news media industry. On June 13, 2018, Pew released the Newspapers Fact Sheet. 

Using data from the 2016 American Community Survey (ACS), released in September 2017 by the US Census Bureau, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance ranked all 185 US cities with more than 50,000 households by the total percentage of each city’s households lacking fixed broadband internet subscriptions. Note that this data is not an indication of the availability of home broadband service, but rather of the extent to which households are actually connected to it.

Almost seven-in-ten Americans (68%) feel worn out by the amount of news there is these days, compared with only three-in-ten who say they like the amount of news they get. The portion expressing feelings of information overload is in line with how Americans felt during the 2016 presidential election, when a majority expressed feelings of exhaustion from election coverage. While majorities of both Republicans and Democrats express news fatigue, Republicans are feeling it more.

In June 2013, news organizations broke stories about federal government surveillance of phone calls and electronic communications of US and foreign citizens, based on classified documents leaked by then-National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. Here are some key findings about Americans’ views of government information-gathering and surveillance, drawn from Pew Research Center surveys since the NSA revelations: