Those confounding readers -- but we love them: what do we make of their habits?

Most of you get your local news and information from more than one source. And where you get it from varies, based on your age, says a report called “How people learn about their local community” that has people in the news business paying attention.

Go ahead. Shake your head. Mutter something like, “No duh,” if you need. You even may add the name "Sherlock." I understand.

But the study goes deeper than others into how you receive news, even to the point to where it notes how word-of-mouth is the preferred method for some things. Some findings in the study, by the long-titled Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and Internet & American Life Project, are worth sharing. 

You can read the report. Or perhaps you already have seen something written about this. For those just entering this story here are a few things to be gleaned from the report:

Local television likely is your favorite choice for local news and information, based on study results showing three of every four Americans either watch a local television newscast or check the station's website. A little more than one-half of you use radio, mostly just for weather and traffic information, and one-half of you check newspapers or their websites.

A little less than one-half – 47 percent – use websites only. These are the people who drive newspaper lovers bonkers. They are the people learning for free what you pay to know, or what an advertiser supports by buying a message that gets attached to the device you use to get your news. Their kin are the 45 percent of Americans who care so little about where they get information they have no favorite local news source, the study showed.

What to make of this as you read your a newspaper, or even a newspaper's website? After all, the survey also notes that most Americans use a variety of news sources for information – new ones such as e-readers and smart phones but also traditional sources, like newspapers.

This is true, the study's authors state, even with those confounding “kids” -- adults under the age of 40 accused of messing everything up for us old-timers who want things the way they were. Except, of course, television before cable, less accurate weather forecasting, unsafe car designs, outdoor toilets, inaccessible air travel, expensive long-distance tolls, less reliable utilities ... I guess that's a different discussion.

The deeper analysis the Pew survey contains shows specific habits. A good example: People relying heavily on television news do so only for certain things – weather, breaking news and perhaps traffic. They rely on other media for other news and on newspapers, the study shows, for the most breadth.

Of course, the breadth they often get is for the least popular topics among Americans surveyed: zoning and development information, local social services, job openings and local government activities. Crime, local politics, community events, arts events and local taxes are the most popular newspaper topics, the study showed. Sometimes the interest people have in a topic boils down to how its portrayed – local politics and taxes are interesting, local government where the politics play out, not so much.

The tidbit in the Pew study that has people in the newspaper industry concerned is that 69 percent of those questioned believe the death of their local newspaper would not impact them, or that the impact would be minor. The study suggests that part of the reason could be that the things people think newspapers do best – that government stuff with professed low interest.

Newspaper folks are trying to figure out how to behave with this data. James Rainey, of the Los Angeles Times, wrote in a piece for the Times that the audience still likes what newspapers do because they seek the information newspapers provide. “They just don't know they like it,” Rainey wrote. “So they need to be reminded why the newspaper and its Web component - even though reduced by budget restraints and staff cutbacks - often remain the first, best hope for word of what's happening on the local scene.”

Interestingly, the Pew study follows by a little more than a month three University of Oregon doctoral candidates who reported that young adults in a study they conducted were more likely to remember what was read on the printed page than online.

Arthur D. Santana, Randall Livingstone and Yoon Cho had 25 people read a New York Times newspaper and another 20 read the Times' web site in a study. Those doing the reading were journalism-related undergraduates with a mean age of 22. A tough crowd for newspapers, 77 percent of them said the Internet was their prime news source while only 19 percent cited print newspapers, the researchers reported.

What helped these test subjects remember news in the printed paper better? The fixed nature of the story on one or two pages, a sense of organization, a more methodical approach to a newspaper than scanning the story online, the breadth of what was read, the researchers said in their paper, “Medium Matters: Newsreaders' Recall and Engagement with Online and Print Newspapers.”

Moreover, design cues, such as story placement and prominence, told readers about the story's importance, the researchers concluded.

These are the kinds of studies that help drive us as we determine how to reach you with news and information. The bottom line, in my mind, still is content. Are you getting what you want? We think we deliver a lot in The Gazette on many counts locally. We continually recognize the work we always can do to deliver more.

That includes new ways that draw people interested in specific topics into behaving as communities when advancing stories about those topics. We keep working toward that.