Reuters Institute study how people consume news online

Trust and interest in news is declining, fear of misinformation is growing, and the popularity of social media as a source of news is on the rise. These conclusions were reached by the authors of a study on the consumption of news on the Internet, conducted by the Reuters Institute. Among social networks, services such as TikTok and Telegram outperform more traditional Facebook (owned by Meta, recognized as extremist and banned in the Russian Federation) and Twitter.

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) at the University of Oxford published its annual report (.pdf), dedicated to how people consume news on the Internet. Among other things, the authors of the report studied what sources of information people use, how much they trust, how this trust changes over time, etc. The authors of the study interviewed 93 thousand people from 46 countries, including the USA, Great Britain, Germany, India, Columbia, Nigeria.

Trust in the news decreased slightly over the year – the number of those who answered that they trust most of the news most of the time fell by 2 p.p. to 40%. Trust in the news is highest in Finland (69%), lowest in Greece (19%). A significant decrease – by 7 p.p., to 43% – occurred in Germany. 56% of respondents are concerned about possible disinformation and misinformation in news content — 2 percentage points more than a year earlier. The level of anxiety of this kind is especially high in Africa (77%), it is the lowest in Europe (53%).

General interest in news is also declining, with only 48% saying they are very interested in news, up from 63% in 2017. At the same time, the share of those who try to avoid news content is 36% and is close to a record level, although it has decreased by 2 p.p. from the high of 2022.

Especially often people try to avoid content that is heavy or controversial, such as news about the situation in Ukraine, issues of national politics, gender and racial inequality, climate change, etc.

According to the authors of the report, there is a significant change use of social networks to read the news. In particular, there has been a decline in the popularity of traditional social networks such as Facebook (owned by Meta Platforms, recognized as extremist and banned in Russia) and Twitter, and an increase in the popularity of services such as TikTok, YouTube and Telegram. Thus, the use of Facebook since 2017 has decreased by 8 p.p., to 57, while the use of TikTok and Telegram has increased by 3 p.p. and 5 p.p., respectively.

In general, people are increasingly starting to read news from social networks or aggregators.

The share of those who first visit the site or app of the publication decreased by 10 percentage points compared to 2018, to 22%. 30% of users start watching news in social networks.

Younger users are more likely to read news on social media than on the websites or apps of publications. There are also differences across countries: for example, in Northern Europe, the majority of users read news on websites or in applications, and in some countries in Asia and Latin America, for example, in Thailand and Chile, the majority use social networks for this.

“Our data shows how the various upheavals of the past few years, such as (the conflict in Ukraine.— “b”) and the coronavirus pandemic have accelerated structural shifts towards a more digital and mobile platform-dominated media environment, with further impacts on business models and journalism formats.

The proportion of those who are ready buy a subscription on news resources, has stabilized. These data were collected only for the 20 richest countries on the list, as in other countries such practices are much less common. On average across these countries, the proportion of people paying for such subscriptions averaged 17%, the same as a year earlier. The share of those who pay for news subscriptions is highest in Norway (39%), the lowest of the 20 countries in the UK and Japan (9%). 23% of those surveyed said they canceled at least one subscription in the past year. Among the reasons for the unwillingness to pay for this, many respondents cited the rising cost of living or high subscription prices.

Yana Rozhdestvenskaya