Ketchum Survey: Traditional Media Still Dominant

Ketchum released the results of survey yesterday in PRSA's PR Tactics newsletter that looked at some of what they considered current "myths" about communications, such as that "traditional media is dead" and "only blogs are relevant." 1,500 people took the online survey, which was conducted in conjunction with USC's Annenberg School of Communications. Some of the results:

• Consumers tend to rely heavily on their local newspapers (69 percent) and their local TV news (74 percent), as opposed to blogs (13 percent). Local media was also near the top of the list of media that consumers found most credible, joined by national newspapers and broadcast news.


• Though young adults are consumers of new media, they also rely on traditional media — the use of traditional media sources, especially national newspapers and broadcast outlets, remains fairly consistent across age groups. Some separation is seen with older adults, who tend to depend mainly on traditional media outlets, while young adults are early adopters of other types of media.


• While traditional media are king, new media — especially blogs, forums and social networking sites — are gaining a foothold with the American public. Blogs are a hot area for marketers. While blogs are popular among new media — second only to social networking sites — podcasts, videocasts and mobile media are found to be more credible by consumers. Social networking sites are the least credible, but they win in popularity and are used by many different groups of adults — not only kids and teens. Moms, men age 25 to 54 and boomers all have communities dedicated expressly to serving them.