Commentary

More Young People Get News From Social Than TV

Social media has passed television as the most popular source of news for young adults, according to a new survey by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which asked approximately 50,000 people around the world about their news consumption habits. The findings echo the results of other studies indicating a sweeping change in how people of all ages -- but especially in younger age demos -- get their news.

Among American adults ages 18-24 polled by Reuters, 28% said they get most of their news from social media, ahead of TV, cited by 24% of the same age group. Unsurprisingly, the proportion is even higher when people look for news on smartphones, with 48% of U.S. online adults naming social media as their main news source on mobile, followed by a news Web site or app at just 23%; other options including news aggregators, email and online video received even smaller percentages.

Also no surprise, Facebook was by far the most popular source of news among social media sites, cited by 44% of respondents who get their news from social media, ahead of YouTube at 19%, Twitter at 10%, and WhatsApp at 8%.

Nor are consumers necessarily averse to having their news filtered by algorithms based on their own habits: 36% of all respondents globally said they would prefer news chosen based on what they’ve already read, and 22% said they would be fine reading news based on their friends’ reading habits. However 30% believed human oversight is still necessary in picking which news is most relevant.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans (62%) get news from social media at least occasionally, up from 49% in 2012, according to a separate survey conducted by the Pew Research Center and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, who polled 4,654 respondents in January and February of this year.

Other findings from the Reuters survey will not give news publishers much cause for cheer: around the world, just 10% of respondents from countries where English is spoken said they have ever paid for online news in the last year. Alongside data from some other recent surveys, this suggests that news publishers may indeed have shot themselves in the foot by giving away content for free in the early days of the Internet.

3 comments about "More Young People Get News From Social Than TV".
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  1. Leonard Zachary from T___n__, June 15, 2016 at 1:52 p.m.

    Ed will not like these facts.

  2. Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, June 15, 2016 at 2:41 p.m.

    Young adults have always been extremely infrequent viewers of TV news shows. Indeed, 25 years ago---before the internet---a typical 18-24 year old watched only one sixth as often as your average person aged 65+. When it came to other TV show genres, however, the margins were much closer. For example oldsters topped youngsters by only two-to-one when it came to sitcoms, generally, and in some cases the younger set outviewed the old foggies.

  3. Ken Kurtz from creative license, June 15, 2016 at 3:36 p.m.

    And the young people in our office remain as unaware as rocks.

    Today, in the coffee break room, I cracked a joke that Trump had announced that the Disney "terrorist" alligator had been radicalized at the same Orlando mosque as the Pulse shooter, and that Obama had made a desperate plea for people to not call what happened last night at Disney an "alligator attack" lest alligators around the globe get smeared by that horrific act.

    Crickets chirping among the two twenty-somethings in there...

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