Most Coloradans Don’t Read Past News Headlines or Short Summaries

Congratulations! You’re among the lowly 38 percent of Colorado news consumers who actually read beyond a headline or short article summary.

As a reward for you, we’re going to include some adorable baby animal photos at the bottom of this post.

But first, let’s get to some actual substance, shall we?

This week, Colorado’s media industry received some sobering statistics compiled by the Colorado Media Project, an initiative led by the Gates Family Foundation, the Boston Consulting Group and a handful of other partners. The project was formed this past spring after the deep staff cuts at the Denver Post, when the future of Colorado’s news landscape looked particularly bleak. Before the demise of the Rocky Mountain News in 2009, there were 500 journalists working between that daily and the Post. Now the Denver Post is down to about seventy reporters.

Without aligning itself to any particular news outlet, the Colorado Media Project sought to collect insights from audiences and newsrooms alike to help media outlets make strategic decisions about how to grow and innovate in a financially stressed industry, one in which Google and Facebook control 57 percent of the online advertising market.

Don’t worry — we’re going to get to those animal photos. But before that, below are a few of the Colorado Media Project’s key takeaways about news consumption from a survey of 2,000 people in Colorado. The results were presented at the University of Denver on Monday, September 24.

The survey found that 62 percent of Colorado consumers only read headlines and short summaries of articles. And 92 percent of all consumers get their news on digital platforms.

The trend toward digital news makes sense when you consider the staggering amount of screen time the average Coloradan engages in each day, including 3.3 hours looking at mobile phones.

The good news, so to speak, for many Colorado outlets is that people tend to trust local news sources over national ones. But the Colorado Media Project also asked survey respondents about their trust in a number of national brands and social-media platforms. Those results are below (and, yes, we lied about the animal pictures):