Corona Daily 052: Where Do You Get Your News From?

Where do we learn about the crime stories from our city, the latest lockdown restrictions, local and global politics? My parents, in their eighties, watch Indian TV channels and read two mainstream local newspapers. My wife reads an English language newspaper, and uses WhatsApp. I digitally subscribe to a few newspapers, but read them in a non-linear fashion. My 17-year old daughter gets news on her mobile before anybody else in our family does.

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Based on data from six continents and 46 countries, the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2021 was published yesterday. It tells us how the coronavirus pandemic has quickened earlier trends. The pandemic shook the news industry, particularly printed newspapers. Initially the lockdowns severely restricted their distribution. More worrying was their loss of advertising revenue. There have been large scale layoffs in the news industry. In the USA, sixty local news organizations were shut off. Free sheets like Metro or the Standard in London have lost 40% of their income. New business models ask readers to subscribe, take membership or donate. These attempts have been unsuccessful in replacing the lost ad revenue.

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 The good news for traditional media is that the trust gap between news media and social media has grown. TV channels like BBC news inspire trust in their viewers. Trust levels vary. Finland has the highest overall trust in the news (65%), and USA has the lowest (29%). After 2016, the US news media experienced a Trump bump, now it is replaced by a Trump slump. Both Fox News and CNN have lost large number of viewers. (Biden is boring).

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Young people and people with low level of education use social media as their source of news. TikTok now reaches 24% of under-35s, many of them using the platform for news.

Generation Z (18-24) has little connection to newspapers, websites or news apps. They get their news from social media, aggregators (Google news, Apple news) or mobile alerts. Mobile aggregators play little role in the Western countries, but are strong in India, Indonesia, South Korea and Thailand. AI-powered apps like Daily Hunt, Smart News, Naver, and Line Today are important sources of discovering news.

Most young people across the world feel they are not fairly represented in mainstream media. There is little coverage of the issues they care about. That is why they embrace social media. They neither pay money nor attention to the media that is unfair and uninteresting for them.

Online newspaper subscribers tend to be more educated, richer and older. As a rule, nobody under 40 digitally subscribes to a newspaper.

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Overall, the leading channel of misinformation is Facebook (28%), followed by news websites (17%), WhatsApp (15%), Twitter (6%) and YouTube (6%). In India, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa and Nigeria, WhatsApp is the big culprit. Its closed, encrypted nature prevents fact-checkers from spotting the origin. UK and USA cite Facebook as the prime worry for misinformation.

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Smartphone dependence has grown during lockdowns. Now 73% access news via smartphones. Mobile phones are rapidly replacing laptops and desktops. In the pandemic, government has further boosted smartphone use for covid messages and vaccine appointments. In the UK, the computer-smartphone gap has grown to 25 points. In the past ten years, computer use fell from 67% to 43%. Smartphone use went up from 29% to 68% in the same period.

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When asked about their motivation, people said Twitter was good to access and debate news. Facebook was used for other reasons. Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok are seen as fun and time-killers. YouTube users were looking for alternative perspective on the news.

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Aggregators like Google news or Apple news simply take you to links. Some journalists still have to create original content. If nobody under forty is interested in reading news in the mainstream media, printed newspapers have another fifty years to live.

Ravi