This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
News is everywhere today — or at least that's the way it seems — in print, via broadcast, on the Internet, and through our cell phones. No wonder some folks complain about being overwhelmed by information. It feels like just too much to sort through.
That may be why most people still rely on traditional news sources for their information and why organizations such as The Salt Lake Tribune are working so hard to get our content on every possible platform for sharing information.
In case you were in doubt, many people still read newspapers. A 2010 study by the Pew Research Center for People and The Press suggests that about 50 percent of adults still use traditional local newspapers as a primary source of news. Online, about 67 percent of news consumers get their news on "legacy," or traditional, news provider sites such as The Salt Lake Tribune. Yes!
Among others, about 13 percent get their online news through information aggregators such as Yahoo or Google — who also rely on legacy news providers. That means that 80 percent of news being consumed online is provided by traditional news organizations such as The Tribune. Yes, again!
I know a story full of numbers can be boring, so thanks for bearing with me. I can't help but share them, and we at The Tribune can't help but celebrate them because they indicate that people still want news brought to them by professional, reliable and credible news organizations such as ours.
So-called "citizen journalism" is valuable and no doubt has a place in this wonderful but sometimes scary new world of digital communication. But it does not — and cannot — take the place of traditional journalism. Anybody can say anything, fictional stories can get thrown around as fact — surely most of us want to rely on a credible source for news, and traditional news organizations like The Salt Lake Tribune are here to fill that need.
I believe that even in this very fragmented news market, we are the best deal in town. While our print circulation, like most newspapers in the country, has seen some slide, online we are showing impressive growth. When you combine print and online, we have more readers than we have ever had.
This December compared with last, we increased online page views by more than 20 percent — from 16.8 million last December to 20.4 million this December.
In November — thanks mostly to our Smart kidnapping trial coverage — we had record numbers of online readers totaling 22.5 million page views. We had the highest single day, week and month we have ever recorded. On the second day alone of Elizabeth Smart's testimony, we had 1.7 million page views.
Where do our online readers come from? Typically they are local. On a story like the kidnapping, we attract readers from around the globe, but most of the time our readership is from right here in Utah.
To serve more new readers, we have developed applications for a variety of mobile devices, so you can get our coverage on iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, iPad and Kindle. The numbers are not enormous yet, but they are growing.
Thanks to good researchers such as the Pew Center, we better understand readers and their needs. We try to stay informed ourselves so that we can better serve residents in our communities.
The digital world is sometimes hard to get your mind around. It changes very quickly — one day blogs are in, and the next they're not. Myspace gave way to Facebook. Or did it? Even the means of measuring use changes. Is it page views or unique visitors? There is no single widely accepted yardstick.
You can be sure, though, it will get sifted and sorted in time. And you can be sure that The Salt Lake Tribune will be there through it all and continue to keep its eye on government and all things of public interest. That is our pledge to you.
Nancy Conway is editor of The Salt Lake Tribune.