Among Young, Internet News Overtakes TV

(MoneyWatch)  With the newspaper industry on death watch, magazines hurting, and radio facing a massive shakeout, the last bulwark of the old media world -- television -- is beginning to hear footsteps along what Al Gore 30 years ago dubbed the Information Superhighway.

A new study by the Pew Research Center polled young Americans aged 18-29 found that as of last month, their main sources for news, at 59 percent each, were TV and the Internet. What is notable about these numbers is how much they've changed since the last time Pew did the same survey, in September 2007.

At that point, TV held a large percentage margin over the Internet as their major news source, 68-34. Over the course of a year and three months, then, young Americans increased their reliance on online news sources by a whopping 25 percent, and reduced their TV reliance by 9 percent.

Polls are just polls, of course, often with a wide margin of error, but it is rare to see any segment of the public change its news-consumption habits as rapidly as young Americans clearly are doing.

When you consider that major advances in mobile, GPS, storage capacity, processing speed, and graphics quality are coming due over the next few years, the future place for TV news has to be brought into doubt.

As we saw in yesterday's post about the partnership between NBC and Outside-in, the balance between professional content and user-generated content on the hyper-local level is flipping, with the latter now outweighing the former by a substantial margin.

This is not all bad news for the TV companies -- if they can adapt fast enough to the new digital reality.