Shorenstein Report: PBS.org Traffic Tops Most Commercial Nets

Yesterday I looked at what The Shorenstein Center’s (pdf) Creative Destruction: An Explanatory Look at News on the Internet found for public radio, today I want to highlight what it found in terms of public television website traffic. For my purposes, report author Thomas Patterson buries the lead: PBS.org traffic, though falling, is higher than that of other TV networks– excluding CNN, which is the sector leader. (See page 9.) The study does not explore how PBS.org’s appeal to children and parents impacts the data.

The report also emphasizes the growth in traffic at non-traditional news sites such as Google and Yahoo and the boom in aggregators and community sites– particularly Digg, where growth (measured as the difference in traffic in April 2007 from April 2006) was literally off the study’s chart.

Lastly, Patterson also looks at the emergence of lobbying groups as news generators: “the internet makes it simple for non-media actors…to become news providers, which does threaten the vitality of America’s news organizations.”

Newspapers, particularly those without national profiles, are portrayed as in trouble.