For more than twenty years, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press has conducted phone surveys in which representative cross-sections of the U.S. public are asked about their level of interest in following major news events. Since 1986, the Center has collected news interest data from over 200 separate national phone polls; including over 200,000 interviews in reaction to more than 1300 news stories. In May 2005, the Center experimented with survey modes for measuring news interest using a web panel design as a possible substitute or compliment to its standard RDD phone methods. The web survey was conducted at the same time and with the same survey items as the news interest phone survey. The survey instrument included questions about specific events in the news and more general news topics (e.g. conditions of the U.S. economy). An initial comparison of results from the phone and web surveys finds greater mode differences for questions on general news topics than on specific news events that could be characterized as a single news event. Preliminary analysis also reveals that young people in the web panel survey compared with the RDD survey are significantly less likely to be following the news items closely. Understanding the sources of these differences is important for planning multi-mode surveys in the future. This paper will further examine how survey administration influences what we know about the public’s appetite for news on current events and public policy.