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Social media connectivity and the digitization of news have not squashed American fervor for local news, a Pew study says. Nearly three quarters of adults are consistently plugged into local news — so much so that 32% of survey participants say the loss of local outlets would majorly impact their lives.

A recently published Pew Internet & American Life Project report finds most Americans continue to follow local news. The reliance on local news is consistent in all age groups, though stronger among those who are 40+, and among female consumers.

The younger population, 18 to 39 years old, use the greatest number of local news sources — an average of 4.38 weekly. Older local news followers say they use about two to three different sources a week.

SEE ALSO: Upworthy Aims to Make the News as Shareable as Cat Videos [EXCLUSIVE]

About 80% of adults older than 40 get their news from television broadcasts. Nearly half of the adults surveyed say they regularly use “word of mouth,” the radio and regional newspaper. Besides reading and chatting about their communities, people also stay in-the-know using mobile phones and tablets.

Younger local news enthusiasts, surprisingly also use “word of mouth” to find out about area news and highlights. The connected generation more likely uses Internet news sources including search engines, local newspaper websites, T.V. station websites and social networks.

Individuals who care about local news are characterized as being very connected in their communities. Many have strong roots in their locales; about 32% of the local news consumers surveyed have lived in their community for more than 20 years.

Local news consumers are fans of news in general. About 63%, six in 10 local news consumers, also follow international news consistently, while 78% say they consume national news consistently. One-third of local news enthusiasts say they get everything that need from regional media.

The Pew report suggests local news is not going anywhere yet. Enthusiasts are generationally diverse, using many news sources to learn about their local communities. Americans are turning to local outlets both online and print — though less and less — for news that would affect them including breaking news, politics, crime, business, schools and education.

What role does local news play in your live? Where do you get information about where you live — online or in print? Tell us in the comments.

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Article recommendations from your friends on Facebook and Twitter aren’t a major source of traffic for news websites, according to Pew’s State of the Media 2012 report — but they have potential to become one.

The annual release focuses on trends in the world of journalism but as news continues to be made, read and reported with technology, this year’s edition is chock full of interesting data about the ways we all use the Internet.

According to Pew, social media use is on the rise, more people are reading the news online and advertisers are spending more money on Internet advertising than ever before. All of those factors have the potential to make social media one of the most important elements of a news outlet’s business plan.

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Social Media Use

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Facebook usage is up, according to Pew: 133 million users in the U.S. from 117 million last year. The social network’s got 845 million active users globally — about 54% of the world’s online population.

It’s also winning the social media popularity contest in terms of time spent on the site. Facebook users scrolled through their news feed, gawked at photos of friends and played games like Farmville for an average of 423 minutes in December of last year.

Tumblr came in second (151 minutes) and Pinterest third (80 minutes). To some surprise, MySpace (13 minutes) beat out Google+ (5 minutes).

Twitter is growing as well — 24 million active users in the U.S., according to eMarketer. That’s an estimated 32% increase from last year year. The company is tight-lipped on exactly how many people use the service.

Journalists have flocked to Twitter, says Pew, giving it “outsized influence” in the media game. Its ability to disseminate breaking news before traditional wire services gives it a “critical role” in journalism, says Pew — Whitney Houston’s death announcement on Twitter 55 minutes before it was confirmed on the AP wire is just one example.

“Twitter is the new newswire,” said Chloe Sladden, the director of content and programming for Twitter, at a recent conference on the future of media at Stanford University.

(It’s worth noting that news broken over Twitter is not always accurate, as was the case with Joe Paterno’s death.)

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News Consumption

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Social media, says Pew, is not yet an overwhelming driver of news traffic. Only 9% of the average news organization’s traffic comes from social media and 9% of online consumers of news in the U.S. “very often” get their news via Facebook or Twitter.

However, those numbers are up from 2010 — and Pew expects them to continue rising. Those numbers also differ wildly for various outlets — outlets with more developed social media strategies tend to see more traffic from Facebook, Twitter and other sites.

Meanwhile, most Facebook users who use the site for news click on articles posted by their friends are family, while more Twitter users get their news from news outlets or journalists.

What are digitally-savvy people reading online? Often the same news sources they’ve read for years, according to Pew. Despite the creation of new online media outlets, the “traditional players” remain the go-to news source for most online consumers of news. “Long-standing” news organizations accounted for 17 of the top 25 most highly trafficked news websites, while 8 are online-only outlets.

However, more Americans are turning to the Internet in general as their primary source of news — 40%, as opposed to 20% who rely on newspapers. Television news, however, remains as popular as the Internet and newspapers combined.

Pew suggests that the creation of frictionless news sharing apps on Facebook might be contributing to the rise of Internet news — Yahoo boasts 25 million users of its social reader, and The Guardian‘s has been installed five million times.

The drawbacks of those apps, according to Pew, is the way they keep eyeballs away from a company’s website (and its advertising) and that it makes media outlets more dependent on Facebook.

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Online Advertising

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How’s the online advertising market doing? Very well. $32 billion was spent on Internet ads in 2011, up 23% from the previous year. Digital ads now make up 20% of all advertising in the U.S.

By far and away, that money is heading directly for the coffers of Google and Facebook. Together, they earned 68% of that $32 billion pie in 2011.

According to Pew, Google and Facebook excel at the ad game because they’re able to collect detailed data about their users and use it to show users advertisements highly relevant to their life and interests. Do you often search for film trailers and swap movie reviews with Facebook friends? Guess what: you’ll probably see cinema advertisements on Google and Facebook.

Pew believes that future growth of the online ad industry will come from local advertising (based on IP addresses and other data), video advertising and mobile ads — the latter of which is expanding faster than any other kind of digital ad. If news companies find a way to tap into the advertising money well, it could help them thrive in the digital age.

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What’s Your Take?

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Do you see any trends in Pew’s findings that you’re excited about? Do you think social media will become more of a traffic driver for news organizations? Sound off in the comments below — we’d love to hear from you.

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Friends on social media don’t always agree when it comes to politics, a study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project has found.

Whereas 25% of social media users who post political content on sites like Facebook or Twitter “always” or “usually” agree with their friends’ politically charged opinions, 73% of those users “sometimes agree” or “never agree” with friends’ opinions.

And what do those users do when they come across a post that makes their blood boil? Nothing, usually.

66% of users say they typically ignore those posts, while 28% will respond either directly or with a counter-post of their own. According to 5% of users, their response depends upon the relationship they share with the original poster.

Why such a low response rate? It could be that users are showing respect towards their friends’ opinions, or maybe they want to avoid a confrontation about politics if they agree on other aspects of life.

The study also found there’s a chance that your friends might discover your political leanings through your Facebook or Twitter posts. 38% of users told Pew that they realized through social media that a friend’s belief structure was different than what they had originally thought.

According to Pew, people who find themselves at the extreme opposite ends of the political spectrum are more likely to post and comment on political material. They’re also more likely to be friends with more people who share views akin to their own, but “there is as much frequency of disagreement as there is of agreement” amongst those ideologically similar users.

Pew’s study was based on telephone interviews with 2,253 adults aged 18 or higher.

Do you agree or disagree with most of your friends on Facebook or Twitter? What do you do when you come across a post with which you disagree? Let us know in the comments below.

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The most common reason U.S. adults use social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is to stay in touch with friends and family members, a new study reveals. A Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project study released Tuesday examines why 66% of online U.S. adults use social media.

“Some social networkers view these sites as venues for making new friends and connections,” says the study‘s lead researcher, Aaron Smith. “But for the majority, social networking sites are most important as a way to share and communicate with friends and family who are already key social ties. Activities such as meeting potential dating partners or interacting with public figures are much less relevant than deepening bonds with those who are already important.”

Of those surveyed, 67% say connecting with friends was a “major reason” they use social media; 64% say connecting with family was also a “major reason.” Half of the social media users say connecting with people they’ve lost touch with is a “major reason” for their use.

Older users (ages 50 to 64) are more likely than younger users (ages 18 to 29) to use social media to find others with similar interests or hobbies. Eighteen percent of the older group, compared to 10% of the younger group, use social for that reason.

SEE ALSO: Facebook Is Most Popular Social Network for All Ages; LinkedIn Is Second [STUDY]

Twitter users are more likely than Facebook or LinkedIn users to connect with public figures using social media. While 41% of users say reading celebrity and politician updates was at least a minor reason for using social media, only 4% of non-Twitter users attributed interactions with public figures as their motivation.

Only 3% of respondents say finding potential romantic or dating partners is a “major reason” they use social media. Conversely, 84% say it was “not a reason at all.”

Pew surveyed 2,277 adults over the age of 18 between Apr. 26 and May 22. There is a 3% margin of error to the findings.

Why do you use social media? Take our poll or tell us in the comments.

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Social media is not ubiquitous. In fact, says a Pew Internet survey released on Friday, just half of U.S. adults are logged on to sites like MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn.

In Pew’s phone survey of 2,277 adults, 65% of Internet users said they use social media. For the first time, 50% of respondents — regardless of whether they use the Internet — said that they did the same.

But they’re less than ecstatic about it. In a word cloud that the study made to show responses to the question “What is one word that describes your experience using social networking sites?” The most common answer was a standard “good.”

It’s easy for the quick growth of social media use to give the impression that everybody uses it enthusiastically. In a similar study that Pew conducted in 2008, just 29% of all Internet users said that they used social media — its adoption has more than doubled in three years.

But email is still the most popular online activity among Internet users, with 61% of survey respondents using it every day. Search engines are the second-most popular activity, with 59% of respondents using them daily. Less than half, just 43%, of Internet users said that they used social media daily.

Growth of social media is largely fueled by seniors, who still aren’t nearly as likely as younger age groups to use it every day. In the past two years, social networking use among Internet users age 65 and older has increased 150% while social media use among Internet users under age 30 has remained about stable (according to Pew, 83% of them use social networks).

“The graying of social networking sites continues, but the oldest users are still far less likely to be making regular use of these tools,” said Mary Madden, senior research specialist and co-author of the report, in a blog post about the research.

The 30- to 49-year-old crowd has been quickly closing the social media usage gap between themselves and the under 30 demographic. In 2008, 42% fewer respondents in the older demographic used social media than the younger demographic. Now the gap between the two age groups is 13%. So too, has the gap between the percentage of the two age groups who use social media daily decreased, from 29% in 2008 to 15% in 2011.

If baby boomers and seniors follow a similar pattern in closing the gap, we might be able to call social media dominant. For now, overall adoption of social media, like sentiment toward it, is still “good.”

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Thirteen percent of online Americans use Twitter, up a full 5% from November 2010, according to a Pew Research Center study released Wednesday.

Much of that growth came from younger adults, Pew found. Nearly one in five U.S. Internet users ages 25 to 34 use Twitter, up from 9% in November. Fourteen percent of users between 35 and 44 also now use the service, up from 8% a half-year previous.

But Twitter isn’t exclusively the domain of young adults; 8% of participants between 50 to 64 and 6% over the age of 65 consider themselves Twitter users, respectively.

In addition, the study found that men are slightly more likely to use the service than women. Fourteen percent of online men in the U.S. use Twitter, compared to 11% of women.

Twitter adoption is also higher among non-white Internet users, proportionately speaking. A full 25% of online African Americans and 19% of online Hispanics use Twitter, compared to 9% of whites.

African Americans and Hispanics are also more active on the service; an impressive 10% of African Americans and 5% of Hispanics in the survey say they use Twitter on a daily basis, compared to 3% of whites.

Twitter and mobile also go hand-in-hand; 95% of Twitter users own a mobile phone, and half access the service from their mobile device.

The study was conducted between April 26 and May 22, 2011 among 2,277 U.S. adults.

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