Photo by prakope.

Hey, we’re not the only ones enthralled with the adventures of Pat Collins. A recent Pew survey shows that television news remains the way that most people get their local news.

According to the survey, 74 percent of the 2,251 adults asked used local television news at least once a week to gather local information. That’s 19 percent higher than the runner-up — word of mouth — and a sizable margin over radio, newspapers and the Internet, which are all bunched together right around 50 percent. The numbers make sense once you realize what kind of local information people want: mostly weather (89 percent of respondents were interested in it) and breaking news (80 percent), which just so happen to be the meat and potatoes of local television broadcasting. (Just remind yourself of those statistics the next time the local networks devote hours and hours of uninterrupted coverage to a breaking weather story.) Newspapers, meanwhile, have to be fretting over the survey’s finding that nearly seven out of ten people said that if their local paper disappeared, it wouldn’t have a “major” impact on their ability to gather local information. Ouch.

As far as we go, we’ll take stock in the survey’s findings that a) young people — aged 18-39 really like reading stuff on the internet, and b) that internet media “ranks first or ties for first for 12 of the 16 local topics asked about,” especially considering that “cute baby animals” was not one of those listed. I mean, you know the internet’s got that portion of the market wrapped up tight.