Survey Findings

On surveymonkey.com I created a nine question survey and titled it the Print, Web and Social Networking survey. I displayed the link through a Facebook message to the friends that I knew would take the survey and be honest with their questions. The first question that I asked was what resource they used to gather most of their news? The answers to this question varied. Some said that they relied on their social networks like Facebook and Twitter to receive their news, some had feeds on personal tablets and another said that they go to sites like Yahoo and stream through the newsfeed on the homepage.

I then asked whether or not that they believed that the pieces they read were objective. Almost every person said yes, while two people said that it depends on the news itself and where exactly they are reading it from leading me to believe that they will trust some sites over others. When asked if they felt whether or not the journalist fail to remain objective every person said yes, they do believe that the journalist themselves do fail to remain objective. That to me is not a good sign when it comes down to people receiving their news leading me to wonder if they are put off by some stories over others.

I also decided to ask them if they found themselves to be agreeing or disagreeing with the news stories that they read or heard and while the majority of people said that they did agree there was a few people that did not. One person in particular stated that most times it is easy to tell when a topic you are reading is false by the topic itself or the context that is used.

The next question had a variety of responses. It was about how trustworthy they found online news articles. The responses ranged from very trustworthy, to people only looking at sites like cnn.com, one person said that they trust only 6 out of the 10 articles that they read while a few people said that online news sites are not trustworthy at all. I think that the response that I received from the next question explained why the people taking the survey felt this way, I asked it people thought that online news journalist had a chance to add in their own opinions and every person said yes.

When asked if they trusted online news or print news more the answers were 50/50 between the two choices and most of them say that journalist in online settings appear to be more personally involved with their stories. When I asked how on a personal level they felt about online news I got back that it is how some of them exclusively get their news while others say that they will just skim the sites.