The Radio Television Digital News Association released the first part of its report series on the United States’ newsrooms — it’s the first of nine planned reports. A large focus of this installment is online activity for both radio and television news. An important focus of this first part is to examine what new digital efforts radio stations made in 2016

For the survey’s radio respondents, 55.5% said they started an important online venture in 2016.

The most common online effort for radio, at 31.4%, was streaming. In second at 18.2% was increasing the overall effort put into digital efforts, in a “more and better” category. Clocking in third with 9.9% was website design. Other noteworthy responses from radio participants was “more video” at 7.4% and “introducing or adding a station app” at 4.1%. Multiple efforts secured 3.3% of the responses: streaming sports games; introducing a first or new podcast; and adding online monetization.

Half of the stations reporting new stream efforts mentioned Facebook Live as part of the effort. And Facebook as a whole platform which can extend a station’s brand was mentioned by 9.1% of respondents who started new online ventures in 2016.

Only 4.1% of respondents claimed they started a mobile station app — a low number which might reflect an already mature mobile ecosystem of station apps developed with various providers.

Nearly all of the radio respondents had websites at 96.5%. Across all radio stations surveyed, 27% of their website content was web-only. A 7.8% sliver of web content reported for radio was user-generated. (See the table below.)

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