Only 20 percent of the stories in the 2012 sample were more than a minute long. Segments about weather, traffic and sports ate up 40 percent of local newscasts’ time, up from 32 percent in 2005, even though this kind of information “is now available on demand in a variety of digital platforms,” the report said.

Stories about government and politics in the markets that were sampled fell by more than half, to 3 percent of the broadcasts from 7 percent in 2005. There was also a marked decline in the percentage of stories about crime, to 17 percent from 29 percent. The volume of economic stories rose to 8 percent, from 3 percent, perhaps, the report’s authors said, because of the fragile state of the economy.

Nielsen ratings show that the audiences for local television newscasts in 2012 declined, albeit slightly, versus the prior year. The medium remains a top source of news overall, though.

Pew’s researchers didn’t find the same kinds of changes to network news programming that it found locally; in fact, they were struck by how little had changed about the big three network nightly newscasts since 2007, the last time they studied them. However, a lot had changed on the three major cable news channels, which have become more politically oriented in the last five years, the study found. Daytime programs on cable news increasingly resembled prime-time talk shows, the report said, adding that “interview segments are now as prominent in daytime cable as they are in prime time.”

As for newspapers, Pew followed up on a prediction in last year’s report that more news organizations would require customers to pay for full access to their Web sites. The number of daily newspapers doing so has more than doubled since then, according to Monday’s report, to about 450. (That figure, out of 1,380 daily newspapers across the country, included the newspapers that have announced such plans as well as the ones that have actually started.)

“This is already helping rebalance the print industry’s heavy reliance on advertising over subscription revenue,” the report said, adding that digital advertising for newspapers “grew only at an anemic 3 percent rate in 2012.”

The report also identified a split in digital advertising. While the news industry “continues to lose out,” it said, “on the bulk of new digital advertising,” some outlets are seeing growth from sponsored content. An online twist on “advertorials” of old, these ad units appear within a publication’s Web page and are often called “native ads.”

“Traditional publications such as The Atlantic and Forbes, as well as digital publications BuzzFeed and Gawker, have relied on native ads to quickly build digital ad revenues, and their use is expected to spread,” the report said.