According to the fourth-quarter 2016 Nielsen Total Audience Report, U.S. consumers have taken full advantage of news content, with adults 18+ spending over 73.5 billion gross minutes consuming news in an average week in 2016—up 18% from the prior year. This increase was powered for the most part by a rise in cable network news viewing. These adult news consumers spent close to six-and-a-half hours a week tuning in to national cable TV news in 2016—up nearly an hour-and-a-half from 2015 and 1 hour 45 minutes from the last election cycle of 2012.
[Clip] Source: Q4 2016 Nielsen Total Audience Report
Beyond 2016, the news genre—and news cycle—show no sign of slowing down, and as of January 2017, consumers’ weekly time spent reading, listening or watching the news among the population is already outpacing the average amount in 2016 over all the different distribution channels.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
