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More News Hounds Are Hopping onto the Net Young women, middled-aged men, African Americans, city-dwellers all are using the Web to get timely information Looking for news? You've come to the right place -- cyberspace. The number of Americans who rely on the Internet as a primary source of news has spiked in recent months, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center For The People & The Press. While still far behind television and newspapers, the Internet news audience has nearly doubled since January. The Pew study found that 11% of Americans now say they rely on the Net as one of their top two sources of news, up from 6% at the beginning of the year. The Web surge seems to be coming most at the expense of television news, which saw its audience dip during 1999. The rapid rise of Internet news is being fed by an explosive increase in Web info interest by two groups that had been slow to warm to the Web: young women and middle-aged men. Since January, the percentage of women under 30 who surfed the Web for news has jumped from 7% to 18% -- matching the interest level of young men. Among men aged 30 to 49, 21% now look to the Internet for information -- up from just 8% at the beginning of the year. MILLIONS HOOKED. The Pew survey, conducted Oct. 7-11, shows that Internet news surfing has become a habit to millions of Americans. Until recent months, Web news watching had spikes in usage caused by major events, such as the release of the Starr Report and the congressional impeachment saga, followed by significant drops in public interest. But the number of people checking out Internet news every day has slowly climbed this year. It now stands at 25% of all wired Americans. There's still a huge age gap in the Internet news audience: 18% of those under 30 rely on the Net for news, while just 3% of those over 65 do. Overall, there is a big gender gap -- 14% of men but only 8% of women -- but that disparity is explained almost entirely by the resistance of elderly women to check out Net news. While wealthier and better-educated Americans are more likely to get their news from the Internet, there are few racial and regional differences. For the first time, African Americans are slightly more likely to get news on the Internet (13%) than are Caucasians (11%). Contrary to conventional wisdom, city dwellers (16%) are more than twice as likely to check out Internet news than are suburbanites (7%), who tune in disproportionately to the radio. While Internet news continues to grow, the Pew survey indicated that the number of new Internet users is starting to level out. Asked when they first went online, 15% said it had been within the past six months -- the smallest "new class" of Web users ever. Just three years ago, in October, 1996, 26% of all users were new to the Internet. The poll included interviews with 1,032 adults. It has a 3.5% margin of error. By Richard S. Dunham in Washington
EDITED BY DOUGLAS HARBRECHT
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