• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, October 12, 2006

According to LexisNexis U.S., when consumers are faced with major events that significantly affect their lives, such as a pandemic or an ominous hurricane, their trust mostly remains with traditional media, such as professional journalists at mainstream newspapers, magazines, television and radio, versus emerging media sources including Internet-only publications, blogs and podcasts.

Findings show that:

• Half of those surveyed said that they would turn to network television for immediate news information
• The next most popular source was the radio (42%)
• 37% of consumers would use daily local newspapers
• 33% cable news or business networks
• 25% of those interviewed would rely on Internet sites of print and broadcast media
• 6% would turn to Internet user groups, blogs and chat rooms

On average, says the report, consumers are four to six times more likely to feel that traditional media is more trustworthy than emerging news sources for news they feel is most interesting.

Top news topics of interest (each selected by approximately 1/3 of the respondents) included entertainment, hobbies, weather, and food/cooking. Following closely was sports, selected by roughly two-in-ten consumers.

For entertainment, consumers most often picked traditional lifestyle media as the most trusted source. However, Internet blogs, user groups and chat rooms were selected next most often, followed by weekly or monthly general interest and news magazines.

The survey identified that food was selected as a topic of interest nearly twice as often as politics/elections (29% vs. 15%). Additionally, popular entertainment was selected as a topic of interest five times more often than personal finance, which received the lowest proportion of interest ratings among the 21 categories included in the survey.

52% of the consumers surveyed anticipate they will continue to mostly trust and rely on traditional news sources. However, 35% expect they will trust and rely on both emerging news and traditional news in the future, and 13% anticipate they will trust and rely mostly on emerging media.

In this study traditional news is defined as professional journalists at well-established, popular and mainstream newspapers, magazines, television, radio, etc (and their Internet sites). Emerging or non-traditional news is defined as citizen journalists, pundits and organizations who create alternative or Internet-only publications, blogs and podcasts, often with a personal or particular point of view.The accuracy rate of the survey is +/- 2.5 to 3.5 percent margin of error at 95 percent confidence for total sample

For more on the study, please visit here.