It’s almost fifty pages long, but well worth the read: a recent study by the Pew Research Center for People & the Press synthesizes 165 separate national surveys and finds that American news preferences have remained ‘surprisingly static’ over the last twenty years. Tucked behind this central conclusion, however, is a suite of more intriguing observations about readership and audience habits. Overall, the study found the percentage of people who follow the news ‘very closely’ dropped from thirty percent during the 1980s to twenty-three percent during 1990s – but then jumped back to thirty percent during the twenty-first century. That swing has less to do with changes in information technology (from broadcast, to cable, to online) than with changes in world events – or ‘reality’ as study author Michael J. Robinson described it. The dip in public attention during the last decade of the twentieth century was likely the result of relative peace and economic prosperity in the United States, he wrote: ‘The ’80s were more ‘interesting’; the ’90s, less so; the ’00s have been most interesting so far.’ The study broke down news in nineteen separate categories and then six ‘super categories.’ Not surprisingly, war and terrorism […]