Selected news stories about the Pew Internet Project and articles citing our data.
Candidates and voters relying more on Internet
1/18/2007 | 
Coverage
Joe Garofoli, San Francisco Chronicle, Politics
'"Sen. Barack Obama updated the world on his presidential aspirations this week by posting a video to his new Web site, where the online response to the Illinois Democrat has been "overwhelming," aides said Wednesday.
The move was strategic, as well as a means to reach Web-savvy supporters. Not only could campaign handlers tightly control Obama's image better in the three-minute video, they also could pad their online address book of supporters with those who visited the site.
It all made for a fine illustration of how new media tools are reshaping politics by disseminating information and involving citizens in campaigns quickly and efficiently.
While the 2006 midterm elections might be called the YouTube campaigns for the emergence of video-sharing tools, most Americans (69 percent) still get most election news from television, according to a study released Wednesday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a nonpartisan Washington think tank.
Newspapers and TV still "outpace the Internet as a campaign source," according to the study, but twice as many adult Americans (15 percent) used the Internet as their primary news source for 2006 campaign information compared with the 2002 midterm election.
"Sure, television is still the country's dominant mass media and mainstream media still controls the agenda of what people should pay attention to," said Lee Rainie, a co-author of the study. "But the Internet is the mac daddy way of how we now do politics."
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