Pew Research Center released a publication stating that the internet overtook newspapers as a news source.

Just this week, the Pew Research Center released a publication, “Internet Overtakes Newspapers as News Source“, which shows the proportion of people who use the internet as their major source of news several percentage points greater than that of people who use newspapers as their major source. However, after looking over some of Pew’s figures, I’m not sure if that’s the case quite yet.

There may not be a significant difference.

After some number crunching, I would not say there exists a significant difference (at least with a confidence interval of 95%) between the proportion of users that use the internet vs.  that of users who use newspapers as their major source for news. Furthermore, 19 times out of 20, the two proportions can actually be considered equal. In my eyes, just as many people still consider newspapers an important news source as those who prefer the internet.

The sum of the proportions are greater than 100%.

If you sum the total of all the news source proportions (television, newspapers, and internet), the total is 145%. This in itself wouldn’t raise my curiosity had the question been “What news sources do you use?”. However, the question apparently was “Where Do You Get Most of Your International and National news?”. I don’t know about you, but personally, “most” means that a respondent can only answer one choice. So, where did the extra 45% come from? The only explanation I can come up with is that respondents were allowed to select multiple “most”s – which would make trending and comparison difficult from year to year. The internet proportion may be increasing, not because people are changing preferences, but possibly because they are simply more aware of the internet.

So while I am sure that the internet will overtake print as the public’s source of news very soon, I think we’re still a while away from that reality, and I question the Pew Research Center’s judgement in releasing a publication titled, “Internet Overtakes Newspapers as News Source” with such questionable points other than to grab some headlines and perhaps funding. Regardless of the validy of this study (or my back-of-the-envelope analysis), perhaps a more interesting publication would have been one that analyzed which medium had the greatest influence towards a purchase. Now that’s a report that would be worth reading, and more in line with the Center’s goal of reporting “trends shaping America and the world“.

What are your thoughts?