A study ahead of last week's recall election in California finds that television is losing ground to the Internet and other media as voters seek information.
Initiative Media surveyed
California residents three times since early September, asking them, among other things, where they go for political information. It's part of the Los Angeles-based media agency's ongoing research
into media use during political campaigns, which Initiative said holds implications for the upcoming big-ticket election, the presidential election a little more than a year from now.
While
television - and network news in particular - still came out on top as the primary source of information, analysts see that the Internet is becoming more of a part of American political life. News
networks led as Californians' sole primary source of information with 16 percent, but by a razor-thin margin. The network news category could also include local TV stations but it isn't broken out
in the online survey. Newspapers received 15 percent of the vote, with the Internet following at 14 percent and cable news at 13 percent. Newspapers were considered the sole secondary source of
political information for 20 percent of those surveyed, followed by network news at 18 percent, cable news at 12 percent and the Internet at 8 percent.
But Internet use among media consumers
seems to be rising with a bullet, with 40 percent telling Initiative that they have become more reliant on the Web for political information since the gubernatorial recall campaign began. That
compares to the 56 percent who say haven't changed their TV or newspaper habits since the campaign started, with about 28 percent saying they spend more time with network TV, cable TV and newspapers
since it began.
"People are just more savvy media consumers. They're not completely reliant on television news to get their information," said Stacey Lynn Koerner, executive vice president
and director of global research integration at Initiative Media in New York. "We knew they were using print but the degree to which the Internet has now become a primary source of information is
certainly interesting to us."
The most popular use for the Internet is to research candidates' positions (48 percent), although it's also used to evaluate opinion leaders' views about the
candidates (30 percent) and to gauge public opinion (22 percent). And television of all stripes is doing its part to drive consumers to the Internet for more information, with 45 percent saying they
turn to the Internet for more data after watching TV.
But a move toward the Internet - which Initiative said is more pronounced now than ever before, as Internet penetration increases -
doesn't mean that the medium isn't undergoing the same kind of scrutiny as other mediums.
"No one is reliant on any one media any more. That goes for individual Web sites," said Pamela Marsh,
research manager at Initiative Media. She said that online users are going to multiple sites in their search for information.
Initiative doesn't handle political campaigns. But it uses the
information to guide clients who are interested in breaking campaigns during heavy election times, and the data it has gathered will also be compared against the data Initiative gets when the
survey goes national in the coming months. Koerner said the results from California are applicable nationally already.
"What's happening is that there's just more ways to access information,
more ways for people to use media. What advertisers need to know is that consumers aren't relying on one source of media to make decisions about products, or new product introductions," she said.