Are you a Net-Newser, Integrator or Traditionalist?

As much as I’m online, I solipsistically figure everyone else must also get all their news from the Internet, which means everyone has the attention span of a gnat and only knows what the headline and maybe the next two paragraphs say.

Not so, the Pew Research Center informs us.

According to a Pew telephone survey of 3,612 adults nationwide, only 13% of us get our news mostly via the Net, a group Pew has cleverly named the “Net-Newsers.” Unsurprisingly, this group is young – median age 35 – and educated. Translation: everybody wants them. The bad news for the news biz is that the Net Newsers tend to skip newspapers and TV, two media segments that are struggling.

The largest segment – 46% — is comprised of Traditionalists – the group that gets most of their news via traditional means. This group is easy pickin’s for advertisers, but they aren’t so demographically desirable:  their median age is 52, 43% are not employed and 60% have no more than a high school education.

While Traditionalists still make up the majority, traditional news habits have fallen off considerably: “Since the early 1990s, the proportion of Americans saying they read a newspaper on a typical day has declined by about 40%; the proportion that regularly watches nightly network news has fallen by half,” reports Pew.

Integrators – those who get their news from all sources – comprise 23% of us. Like the Net Newsers, this group is educated and affluent but they’re a bit older.

Finally, 14% of us are disengaged and don’t bother with the news at all. I suspect these are the people who spend all their time playing Guitar Hero and frankly, I don’t really blame them.

Let’s give my hometown some love: I feel it’s my duty to note that celebrity-starved Denver soon will be deluged with Hollywood stars and I couldn’t really be more excited. I’m probably one of the very few, however, because Denver isn’t exactly the most pop-culture focused town. Mention snowboarder Shawn White or triathlete Dave Scott or mountain climber Ed Viesters and everyone is all over it. Mention that soon Kanye West (apparent purveyor of the weirdest, most confusing Web site ever) will be gracing our fair city, and you receive blank looks.

In any case, the Hollywood Reporter has this piece on who to look out for while in the Mile High City next week. Among the hoi-polloi expected to attend: Ben Affleck, Josh Brolin, Annette Bening, Spike Lee, Anne Hathaway, Susan Sarandon, Richard Schiff and Kerry Washington. I’ll be sneaking around the convention so I’m hoping to run into Susan Sarandon on the street somewhere. (Note to self: The really big stars don’t have eponymously-named Web sites.)

And for the record, BC Beat, I have never wondered what Matt Lauer and Al Roker looked like in spandex and I was a little frightened to tune in to the Today Show this morning and learn, (although I have to say – not bad, Matt!) Also, it was an impressive feat of editing that got both Al and Matt’s hula hoops to land on their legs. Unsurprisingly, NBC head honcho Jeff Zucker’s already bragging about what a great job NBC has done with these games, but if I were him, I’d be bragging too.