The Carnegie-Knight Task Force released a report on the Future of Journalism Education on Monday, which indicated that 57% of teachers use online news sources with some frequency.
This figure is noticeably larger than the 31% that utilize national TV news, and the 28% that uses daily newspapers. The least popular source of news was local TV news, which was only used by 13% of teachers according to the study.
The findings only confirm the shift from tangible to virtual news sources that many have noticed for the past couple years, including advertisers, who have been forced to tweak their campaigns accordingly.
The BBC, the New York Times, and CNN.com were the most popular online news sites according to the study.
The main reason for the rising use of online resources seems to be students’ tastes. Though teachers indicated that they preferred tangible, paper forms of news, only 8% said that their students felt the same way. Of the teachers included in the survey, 75% said that newspapers were the least appealing form of news for their students.
Local papers have been slow to catch onto this trend, according to the report. These papers promote their newspapers to classrooms, but only 2% try to steer teachers and their students to their Web sites.
Most local news sites are visually and navigationally murkier than their larger, national counterparts, which also poses a problem. It’s one thing to steer classrooms to their sites, but it’s a whole other thing to keep them drawn to the site.
The study surveyed 1,262 teachers who are involved with students from grades 5 to 12 in the fall of 2006.
Aggregate news sites seem to be the next step for the educational arm of the news in general. Though there are plenty of them out there today, including Google News and Topix, it seems that teachers would be greatly drawn to an aggregate news site geared specifically towards classrooms.
Having these sites targeted by grade would be a great way to reach students with news that is not only relevant to them in their community, but also relevant to them in terms of vocabulary and accessibility.
Accessibility would be greatly helped by sites like Congoo, which draws from a large number of sources and actually allows its users to view subscription content for free. The catch is that a Netpass toolbar needs to be downloaded.
Online news seems to have found itself another niche to cater to, and benefit from, in classrooms. This narrower targeting would be appealing to advertisers as well.
Sources:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070129/wr_nm/newspapers_
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