To Be or Not To Be (not anymore)

The passing of Peter Jennings this week marks the end of a TV era. The “big three” news anchor are gone (Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and of course Jennings). The days of a Walter Cronkite clone presenting The Evening News have passed. The careers of the above mentioned faded with the passing of time, but many would argue that big network media was on life support anyways…in fact if Hamlet were alive today he might have asked… “To Channel Surf or To Net Surf that is the question“. A recently released Canadian poll reports that Internet Surfing is overtaking TV watching. According to the survey the amount of time spent on the Web has increase by 46% since 2002. When this survey pool is narrowed to people between the ages of 18-34 the Internet overtakes TV. These younger people spend 14.7 hours on the Internet as opposed 11.7 hours of watching TV(watch out Katie Couric). More than a quarter of the survey respondents say they don’t have a favorite website…this means that Internet users are looking at varied sources to get information, especially when it comes to news. People log into specific sites for Health, Political and Sports news and many have a favorite Weather site…The big survey loser is the newspaper. The 18-34 year old set spends only 2.5 hours per week reading newspapers. This is the group that is changing the face of the information world.