UK a nation of online news junkies

Ninfomania, the obsessive need to find news information, is sweeping the UK, according to a new study.

The ninfomania epidemic is fuelled by the internet, with the average UK adult checking 275,000 news stories in their lifetime, it is claimed.

A study conducted by internet provider TalkTalk said Brits are more informed now than at any time before because the internet provides "a wealth of accessible and instantaneous news".

The TalkTalk study revealed that UK adults digest 13 different news stories from TV, radio, newspapers and the internet every day. One in six adults, equivalent to 7.8 million people, get through more than 20 news stories a day. Only 1 per cent admitted that they did not bother staying informed with the news.

International news stories were deemed more popular than sports news (16 per cent), entertainment (13 per cent) and health news (8 per cent).

News junkies, or ninfomaniacs (not to be confused with nymphomanics), particularly favour the internet for keeping updated as the net gives the best 'snapshot' of what's going on.

"Now we are all exposed to a huge wealth of information every day, not just online but across all media, which makes us better informed than ever about what's going in the world," said Dominic Stinton of TalkTalk.

However, the founder of the web Sir Tim Berners-Lee recently sounded an alarm bell about the way inaccurate information is so easily spread on the internet.

He called for new systems that would give websites a label for trustworthiness once they had been proved reliable.

As if to enforce Berners-Lee's point about the level of disinformation on the net, surfers who visited Radio 1 DJ Vernon Kay's Wikipedia page this week were informed of his death while holidaying in Greece. But Vernon Kay is alive and well.

Are you a news junkie? Where do you get most of your news from and do you trust your news sources? Let us know on the Web User Forums.

www.talktalk.co.uk
www.wikipedia.org