Many students get news from social media than other platforms

When Austin McCartney, a senior studying management information systems, wants to be informed, he relies on his peers to tell him what news he should read. Trusting that they will find the most important stories, McCartney logs onto his favorite social media platform and shuffles through posts from users like him.

“I personally go to Reddit,” McCartney said. “It’s my home page.”

McCartney is not alone. According to a University of Texas School of Journalism survey, 32 percent of UT students get their news from social media, ranging from Twitter to Reddit to Facebook.

The increase in social media as a way to get news has been growing rapidly over the years. About 67 percent of adults regardless of their generation use social media to get their news, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center.

Paula Poindexter, founder of News Engagement Day and UT professor, said students in particular are gravitating toward sites like Facebook because they became popular while the millennial generation was growing up.

“It embraced millennials unlike traditional news media that pretty much ignored millennials,” Poindexter said.

Students like freshman biology major Paul Vu agree with Poindexter. Growing up in a family that watched the news on TV, Vu says he didn’t watch news that felt useful or interesting to his age group. But now with social media, he can go looking for stories that he wants.

“I watched it because it was on, but I never heard stories about people like me,” Vu said. “Now I can go out and find those stories myself.” Vu says the ability to find stories about successful millennials keeps him interested in his social media accounts instead of major news publications that cover broad topics.

Keven Ann Willey, vice president and editorial page editor at the Dallas Morning News, says the increase in online news consumption is because social media users can be their own boss in news consumption.

“Nowadays, we can individually set up and establish our own gatekeepers,” said Willey at the Denius Panel Event at UT on Tuesday. She says the consumers’ ability to have a more direct role over the news their receiving is the biggest difference from the past.

For news consumers and social media users like McCartney, the fun is in the ability to insert themselves into how the news is received by others. For instance, on websites like Reddit, users vote “up” for what they think should be the most read information. The post with the most positive votes gets to be at the top of the forum. On the other hand, Facebook users only have to “share” their information for their connections to see it and know they thought it was important.

McCartney says he is aware of the user’s role as a judge and the potential issue that comes with it. “I know the inherent biases,” McCartney said about the content posted by other users. “But still…sometimes, I trust it more because they’re users like me.”