Pew: Mobile Is Major News Vehicle

Call it a mobile majority — the Pew Research Center does — with a little "short attention span theater" thrown in, but as of the start of 2015, almost 80% (39 of 50) of the top digital news sites were getting more traffic from mobile devices than desktops. In the legacy news department, broadcast viewership was up, while cable had "another rough year."

That is according to a just-released annual State of the News Media study (the 12th edition) from Pew Research Center, which found that desktop visitors tended to spend more time on the sites than mobile surfers. The sites included "legacy print, cable, network, international and public broadcasting outlets as well as digital-only entities."

The top 10 digital news sites by total number of uniques for January 2015 were Yahoo-ABC News, CNN, NBC News, Huffington Post, CBS, USA Today, BuzzFeed, The New York Times, Fox News, and the Daily Mail.

For the full story go to Multichannel.com.

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.