Poynter.org
For its just-released “Navigating News Online” report, Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism examined where news consumers go for news, how they get there and what lures them away. Some highlights from Rick Edmonds:
* While Google search, Google news, and other aggregators are the top way into news sites, “social media is rapidly becoming a competing driver of traffic.” Facebook drives almost 8 percent of the traffic to the Huffington Post and between 1 and 7 percent to the other 24 studied.
* Eight of the top 25 sites attracted more women than men, including the Huffington Post, which also had the greatest proportion of young adults.
* At all the sites, casual users who come only a few times a month account for most of the visitors. “On average, 77 percent of the traffic to the top 25 news sites came from users who visited just one or two times.” At USAToday.com, for instance, 85 percent of visitors came one to three times in a month; three quarters only once or twice.
Pew says its findings suggest that there’s not one group of news consumers online but several, each of which behaves differently. “These differences call for news organizations to develop separate strategies to serve and make money from each audience.”
* “The 5 must-knows about how users navigate news online” [Poynter.org]
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