Overall I felt that the facts in the Pew Research Center’s State of the Media 2017 report were were interesting.

While the report covered many topics, ranging from Digital News, Public Broadcasting, Local TV News and more, the two sections that were of most interest to me were Public Broadcasting and Audio & Podcasting.

I found the Public Broadcasting section interesting because my major is journalism with a concentration in electronic broadcasting so I felt that it was kind of cool to be able to see some of the facts since I want to go into radio soon and I had just never thought about some of these things. Like for instance, the article stated that on average in 2016 there were a total of about 10 million listeners for the top 20 NPR-affiliated public radio stations.

If that number didn’t already seem high, what makes this number so unique is that this number is up for close to nine million from just the previous year in 2015. When you put it in that perspective, it makes you wonder what caused a spike in listeners which could be a range of things such as more people tuning in to catch updates on the presidential election, less people wanting to read about news in papers or on the computer and decided to tune into the radio.

The other section that I found to be interesting Audio & Podcasting, primarily because I don’t know much about online audio listening/radio and podcasts. The main thing that surprised me is that the fact that online radio listening is steadily growing every year. That was shocking to me because I don’t know of many people who listen to the radio online.

However this number has raised to 40% from 6% in 2010. Another thing that I learned but wasn’t necessarily shocked by was how from 2015 to 2016 the number of people who listen to NPR podcasts online the number of people rose from 2.5 million to 3.5 million. This number doesn’t shock me because over the years more and more people have began listening to podcasts or even creating their own as we become more advanced in technology.