The results are in. More than 500 people took our reader survey and after seven months of blogging, we now know more about who is reading. We learned a few new things, confirmed a few suspected things and know more about where we want to go in the future. Thanks for participating.
You are an engaged group. Virtually everyone who filled out the survey is a registered voter. In addition, 92% of you say that you are either very interested or extremely interested in state politics, which is good since that’s primarily what we write about. Two-thirds of you read PoliticsNC at least once a week and another 18% say you read several times a month. More than 80% of you say you get your news from an internet news site, including 69% who read blogs and 67% from online newspapers. Surprisingly, only 45% get your news from a hard copy newspaper and only 58% are watching television news.
Philosophically, you are liberal, including 45% who consider yourselves moderately liberal. You are also overwhelmingly Democrats, though 22% consider yourselves independent of either party. Unfortunately, only 4% of respondents call themselves Republicans. While I’m a proud Democrat and unabashedly liberal on most issues, I enjoy engagement with Republicans who tell me why they think I’m wrong. In the future, I hope we can encourage more thoughtful Republicans to engage here.
The readership skews slightly toward men by a margin of 52%-48%. You are also overwhelmingly white. Only 5% percent of respondents identified as Black or African-American and only 4% Hispanic, Native American, Asian or something else. We will work on changing that.
You are older than I expected. Fully 66% of readers are over 50 years old. You are also an educated lot. Seventy-eight percent have a bachelor degree or better, including 41% with a graduate degree.
About half of the readers work in Government, politics or advocacy, law, nonprofits or education. Another 10% are retired, 6% work in health care or pharmaceuticals, 3% are in media or journalism, 3% work in marketing and 3% work in financial services.
Essentially, we have an older, educated, professional readership that skews slightly male. They are also liberal and identify mostly as Democrats. In the future we will reach out to more women and minorities and work on engaging Republicans and conservatives. Thanks, again, to everyone who participated.
If you have enjoyed reading PoliticsNC, please help us out with a donation. Thanks.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
These are the results of the self-surveying, correct?
Or was there an attempt to capture lurkers or screen for anything?
Thanks.
They are self-surveying. No screens. I flogged it for a week and took what we got.