Gallup | The New York Times | Poynter | Fortune
55 percent of Americans say TV is their main news source, Gallup reported Monday. 21 percent cited the Internet, 9 percent cited print.
Of the respondents who cited a specific TV news operation, 8 percent said they turned to Fox, 7 percent said CNN, and 4 percent said “Local TV news.”
A Pew news-consumption study published last fall found 55 percent of respondents reported getting news from TV the day before.
The New York Times’ Brian Stelter writes about the increasing value of TV stations in swing states: Allbritton Communication Company’s WJLA-TV in Washington, D.C., could be worth up to $300 million because it broadcasts into Virginia, he reports. Allbritton, for which I used to work, is exploring a sale of its television stations.
Writing on Poynter.org today, Rick Edmonds gives several other reasons it’s a good time to sell TV stations, including more money available to finance transactions, a rebound in automotive advertising and climbing retransmission fees.
TV will face some of the same problems print media does as audiences shift to digital, Edmonds writes, but “political, auto and other advertising should hold solid over the five-year investment vista investment firms typically consider.”
A Fortune article this week looks at the transformation of the news business, excerpting an oral history Harvard’s Shorenstein Center and the Nieman Journalism Lab will publish this fall. In it, Google’s Eric Schmidt lays the blame for the traditional news business’ decline on the fact that it “has no engineers”:
You cannot innovate and build new products without engineers in your field. If you don’t have them, you have to find somebody who does and partner with them in a clever way.
