Pew hired Princeton Survey Research Associations International to conduct its poll of 1,201 members of the Online News Association. They had a 24 percent response rate. I paid two grad students and an undergrad to help me survey 174 online journalists (mostly non-members of ONA). We had a 29 percent response rate.

But even more importantly, I think the survey we did here at UNC does a much better job showing us the future of news… which is bright if you dream of a future of inexperienced, homogeneous copyeditors shuffling text around a Web page.

Here’s the topline of the PEJ survey. Here’s the data from the UNC survey.

Perhaps the main difference between the two surveys is that I was interested in what journalists do, while the questions in the PEJ survey emphasized what journalists think.

What the UNC survey found was consistent with a lot of findings in my earlier survey of North Carolina’s online journalists and in the 2006 survey by C. Max Magee , working with Rich Gordon at Northwestern University:

• Online journalists say they have a high level of proficiency in traditional skills such as news judgment, grammar/style, their company’s content management system, writing headlines and blurbs. They also say they have a high level of proficiency with “Web usability.”
• They say they have a low level of proficiency in technical skills such as SQL, Flash, computer programming languages, and even Dreamweaver.
• They spend most of their time managing projects , writing and editing scripts
• They are 93 percent white.
• They work mostly with text and are mostly editors.
• A third have fewer than five years experience.

The lesson, Thames writes: “The more you post, the higher your numbers will climb.”

Yes, and there’s a good reason for that.

It’s important for journalists to understand that the way people read news online is fundamentally different from the way they read in print. Put simply, print is appointment content and online is incidental content.

Print is delivered in a package at the same time every day. Online is delivered in drips and drabs in an ongoing process throughout the day. Yahoo News — essentially the AP wire repurposed — is the most popular news site in North Carolina and the United States.

Online news is consumed by an at-work audience. Online news readers sneak quick peeks at news while they should be crunching the latest spreadsheet. They are reading news on the sly, in short undetectable bursts. According to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, online news consumers spend six minutes a day in that medium while newspaper readers spend 15 minutes a day with the dead tree edition. The number one threat to journalism in America isn’t the decline of classified ad revenue, it’s the potential that corporate American will one shut down access to news sites and blogs.

In the great debate about whether the unlimited space of the Internet will encourage more in-depth reporting or whether the bottomless news hole will create a world of news briefs written in 140 characters or less, the latter has won.

Among the online news audience, more people say they go online for “breaking news” than “in-depth coverage,” also according to Pew.

How Did The Pilot do it?

Staff Size: 14

Increase in Online Resources: Made the sports editor the go-to online guy. Gave him a video camera and tape record and made the Web his top filing priority.

Decrease in Print Resources: Eliminated one copy editor position.

Change in Workflow: Stories are now published first online if they break on a day when The Pilot doesn’t print.

That, of course, begs the question — did The Pilot trade a perceptible decrease in quality for a perceptible increase in quantity? Certainly they increased their risk of error, but isn’t that the hallmark of a good business — knowing when to take calculated risk?