Katerina Eva Matsa

As journalists and media practitioners gather for the annual Online News Association Conference, here are 10 key findings from recent Pew Research Center surveys and analyses that show how these rapid digital shifts are reshaping Americans’ news habits:

1) About four-in-ten Americans now often get news online.
2) Mobile is becoming a preferred device for digital news.
3) Long-form journalism has a place in today’s mobile-centric society.
4) More than half (55%) of US smartphone users get news alerts, but few get them frequently.
5) Social media, particularly Facebook, is now a common news source.
6) Overall, more digital news consumers get their news online in the process of doing other things online (55%) than specifically seek out the news (44%), though there are differences by social media platform.
7) Few Americans trust social media as a news source.
8) While many Americans get news from social media, few are heavily engaged with news.
9) In the digital news environment, the role of friends and family is prominent – and for some it’s an echo chamber.
10) Three-in-ten Americans turn to 2016 presidential candidates’ digital messages for news and information about the election – and the candidates’ social media posts outpace their websites and emails as sources of this news.

Within America’s 50 state capitol buildings, 1,592 journalists inform the public about the actions and issues of state government. Of those statehouse reporters, nearly half (741) are assigned there full time.

While that averages out to 15 full-time reporters per state, the actual number varies widely -- from a high of 53 in Texas to just two in South Dakota. The remaining 851 statehouse reporters cover the beat less than full time. Newspaper reporters constitute the largest segment of both the total statehouse news corps (38%) and the full-time group (43%).

But the data indicate that their full-time numbers have fallen considerably in recent years, raising concerns about the depth and quality of news coverage about state government. As newspapers have withdrawn reporters from statehouses, others have attempted to fill the gap. For-profit and nonprofit digital news organizations, ideological outlets and high-priced publications aimed at insiders have popped up all over the country, often staffed by veteran reporters with experience covering state government. These nontraditional outlets employ 126 full-time statehouse reporters (17% of all full-time reporters). But that does not make up for the 164 newspaper statehouse jobs lost since 2003.