U.S. consumers face a dizzying array of choices in how to spend their media and entertainment dollar. At the same time, the current economic climate has put even more pressure on how households make decisions. A baseline for thinking about entertainment spending is the notion of “share of wallet,” defined here as the percentage of monthly spending for all entertainment options by a household. At a macro level, the video game category represents 5% of total U.S. households’ entertainment spending. Among households that are active buyers in the video game category, this figure is nearly double, with over 9% of total entertainment spend attributed to game-related content, according to a study Nielsen Games.

An overwhelming majority of reporters and editors now depend on social media sources when researching their stories. Among the journalists surveyed, 89% said they turn to blogs for story research, 65% to social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and 52% to microblogging services such as Twitter. 61% of reporters use Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia. Most journalists said that social media were important or somewhat important for reporting and producing the stories they wrote, according to a study by George Washington University.