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Study Finds That Readers Don't Read Print Media, But Don't Trust Online News, Either

by Amar Toor on July 28, 2010 at 10:00 AM

woman sleeping on bookAs print journalism continues to die a slow death, consumers are flocking to the Internet to get their news. According to a recent study, though, people are still having a hard time trusting what they read online. A report from the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California finds that more than 75-percent of users rank the Internet as the most important source of information, while a little more than half said they consider newspapers to be significant, too. Also, 18-percent of those surveyed claimed to have canceled print subscriptions in favor of free online content.

At the same time, though, just 39-percent of readers said they considered online information to be reliable -- the lowest percentage researchers have recorded since beginning the series of annual studies ten years ago. Meanwhile, 14-percent of consumers said they considered only a negligible portion of online material to be reliable, the highest figure the USC study has ever found. And, as the New York TImes points out, even popular news sites are often considered untrustworthy. Nearly 25-percent of those surveyed said that they could only rely on half or less than half of the online content they read regularly.

In a nutshell, USC's study captures a dilemma at the epicenter of today's media. Readers who have been weaned on free online news certainly don't want to pay for information, yet the majority of consumers still have trouble trusting the free material they read. We suppose that a large part of the problem stems from the Internet's deeply ingrained ethos of recklessness; many consumers still view online spaces as today's wild, wild West, where lawlessness and free-wheeling pundits reign supreme. Thanks to Twitter and today's real-time news cycle, a single story can often mutate several times within the course of an hour.

Going forward in today's print-less world, then, news outlets must find a way to help readers more clearly differentiate pure, agenda-less content from the rest of the bias-infused products on the market. At this point, it certainly doesn't look like there's an easy solution, but, if you have any suggestions, please let us know. [From: New York Times]

Tags: content, DeathOfPrint, journalism, JournalismOnline, media, news, newspaper, online, print, reading, studies, study, top, twitter, UniversityOfSouthernCalifornia

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