Net beats newspapers for election news
Pew shows that the Net is second only to tv as our source for election news. It’s 72%, 33%, 29% for tv, Net, and newspapers.
This can be slightly misleading, though. For me — and I am confident that I am 100% typical of people who are like me — the only election news I get directly through TV comes through The Daily Show and Colbert. Otherwise, the ecology of news works like this: Someone posts a bit of news on some site. That snippet may well come from a mainstream source, or it may not. But like a greasy crumb dropped on the sidewalk, it’s instantly swarmed by ants. The ants — that’s you and me, sister — point at it, link to it, explain it, deny it, make fun of it, connect it with something else, and send it or what we’ve made of it around the world. The morsel is gone, digested, appropriate. The ants are the media.
The mainstream are only noticed if they’re doing as good a job at being a news ant as the rest of us.
