State of the News Media 2015

Call it a mobile majority. At the start of 2015, 39 of the top 50 digital news websites have more traffic to their sites and associated applications coming from mobile devices than from desktop computers, according to Pew Research Center’s analysis of comScore data. At the same time, though, desktop visitors to these sites tend to spend more time per visit than do mobile visitors. For half of these top 50 news sites -- which include legacy print, cable, network, international and public broadcasting outlets as well as digital-only entities -- visitors from desktops stay longer than those coming through mobile. The reverse is true for only 10 of the sites, while for 15 sites the time spent is roughly equal. In tandem with the growth of mobile has been the further rise of the social Web, where the flow of information embodies a whole new dynamic.

Some of our 2014 research revealed that nearly half of Web-using adults report getting news about politics and government in the past week on Facebook alone, a platform where influence is driven to a strong degree by friends and algorithms. Even as mobile and social news habits evolve, legacy platforms have by no means been abandoned, though some are faring better than others. Local TV continues to capture broadcast viewers, with slight increases for evening (3 percent) and morning (2 percent) newscasts and larger ones for early morning and midday in 2014. Network television news saw a second straight year of audience growth (5 percent in evening and 2 percent in morning), for a combined average evening viewership of roughly 24 million. Cable news, on the other hand, had another rough year, with prime-time median viewership down 8 percent across the three channels -- Fox News, MSNBC and CNN. Fox News fared the best, but still saw a 1 percent decline year over year. And newspapers, after an unusual year of small gains in 2013, saw both daily and Sunday circulation fall another 3 percent in 2014, declines that were felt across papers of all sizes. Newspaper weekday circulation has now fallen 19 percent since 2004.