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Experience And Internet News: The Real Reason For The Online New Reading Gender Gap

Experience and Internet News: The Real Reason for the
Online News Reading Gender Gap
by
Amy Schmitz Weiss, Master's Student
Sharon Meraz, Master's Student
Nilo Figur, Doctoral Student
Paula M. Poindexter, Associate Professor

School of Journalism
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712

Presented to:
Newspaper Division
AEJMC Annual Convention
Kansas City, MO
July 2003


Introduction
Reading news is now the third most popular activity on the Internet behind e-mailing and Web browsing. According to the most recent UCLA Internet Report , 52% of the U.S. population now reads news online. After the development of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s and the Netscape Navigator Web browser in 1994, the Internet became attractive to consumers and media companies as a viable new medium for communication, entertainment, and news and information. The dramatic increase of news Web sites from 60 newspapers online in 1994 to more than 3,300 newspaper, television and cable news Web sites by 2003 as well as the cross-promotion from traditional newspapers and television and cable newscasts have contributed to the popularity of news on the Internet.
Although reading news online is among the top three activities on the Internet, statistics continue to show that men and women do not read Internet news equally. In fact, the most recent Pew Research Center study reported that 57% of men read news online while only 43% of women read news on the Internet. This gender disparity in attention to news is unique to the Internet; for other news media use, there is no difference between men and women.
Historically research studies have found differences in how men and women read newspapers and what content in the newspaper they pay attention to, but no significant differences have been found in overall newspaper reading. Similarly, no significant gender differences have been found in newsmagazine reading and regular attention paid to television...