Whoa, the state of news media is eye-opening.

It is definitely a digital world. Pew research’s data clearly proves that: 93% of the population in the U.S. receives their news through online sources. Not paper, not from their neighbor–online.

Woohoo, 2018! We murdered all human interaction.

Actually, this isn’t a fact and was a mere joke on my part. I wonder what that statistic would be, hearing news from friends/family or just people. Actually listening and having a conversation rather than getting an alert from the AP Mobile app. Pew research center should look into that, although hats off to them for this information. I’ll try and break it down for some of my readers.

So, online news is changing the game.

Nine-in-ten adults get their news online. That’s crazy. It makes me feel like newspapers don’t exist anymore even though they do. There are plenty of intriguing data in this sample, but that could be the most breathtaking. It really shows us how far we have come technology speaking. Everything is online now, including news. We are developing, creating a modern way to receive our news faster than ever before. It is actually good. Good for emergencies and a lot of other reasons. It’s creating more jobs, which goes into the second interesting fact I noticed.

Journalism jobs are still there.

I stumbled upon the salaries for local TV news jobs, and I was surprised to see that most job salaries are still rising from the past year. In my head, I would think that they would drop down and take a cut on their salary since they need to make room for the new jobs coming in (all the online jobs). They don’t though, they actually remain pretty consistent when it comes to the raise each year.

The only jobs that did take a pay cut was news writer and the news assistant. It was interesting to see at the top of the list, the salaries for bigger name positions, were going much, much higher.

The top three positions on a local TV news station each received around $10K from 2014 to 2016, and I would say that they are likely to get the same boost in 2017 when the statistics come in.

Pew Research Center provided chart

This wasn’t the most intriguing fact throughout the whole reading, but I thought it was pretty interesting. It really is just crazy how many Americans still look for news, and we have revolutionized how we get that news.

The average time someone spends on a online news source was 2.15 minutes. MINUTES. Another kind of mind-blowing statistic. I’m not the fastest reader; I could get through maybe one article in 2 minutes. That is really looking into it though.

So, does that mean most Americans are just scrolling through and looking at pictures? In that case, I wouldn’t even qualify that for the stat. That’s skimming news, not reading and understanding.

This reading really opened my eyes. It gives me hope for my profession and news itself. This was a good read and had some interesting data on the state of news media. It shows big change in areas you wouldn’t really think has changed all that much.

Did you know national radio gained 20 million listeners over the past two years? Probably not, neither did I. That’s why we need statistics and people at Pew Research Center, not just to get a visual, to see the actual numbers and adjust accordingly.