Notes on the Reuters Institute Digital News Report
Oxford University’s Reuters Institute has just published its annual report into Digital News consumption: an impressively big study of 20+ thousand online news consumers in 12 countries. Here are some of the things that struck me as especially interesting:
Top News Apps
No wonder an app like Circa can’t find much of a foothold… we don’t actually use News Apps all that much and are much more likely to access news via a browser view from someone else’s app (which means Facebook, mostly, and a bit of Twitter, presumably). The big exception is the UK where the trust and brand of the BBC means that a staggering 51% of smartphone news users open the BBC app.
The biggest news app in the US is the Fox News app, which 14% of respondents said they used.
Young people don’t only get news from Facebook
This is lazy journalism and I see it around a lot — last sighting was just this morning. While most (or many) millennials do get news from Facebook, that doesn’t make it their main source of news. In fact, only 21% of 18–24 yr olds say Social Media is their main source of news:
On p.12: 41% of respondents (all countries/demographics), 40% (US only) have used Facebook “for finding, reading, watching, sharing or discussing news in the last week”.
Trust
General trust in news is lowest in the US: only 32% of respondents could agree with the statement “I can trust most news most of the time.” The number jumps to 56% when the question is focused just on the news sources that the respondents themselves choose to read or watch. (“My news is trustworthy… that other stuff though…”) I wonder if the survey was done pre- or post-Brian Williams Conflate-gate.
Seek news on Twitter, bump into it on Facebook
This rings pretty true for me. I don’t imagine going to FB to find news because (1) I don’t expect Newsfeed to be up-to-the-minute and (2) I don’t really expect to find my friends posting news stories.
The homepage is dead
We knew this already. But… wow, the decline…
Thinking of the way you looked at news online (via any device) in the last week, which of the following ways of consuming news did you use?
Respondents that said “yes” to Lists/Front pages:
- 2014: 58%
- 2015: 42%
If not dead, dying really really fast.
Newsletters are big(gish)
25% of US respondents cited email as a way they came across news stories. I suppose this could also include our old friend “Dark Social” as people email stories to each other.
The chart that shows this datapoint also illustrates the massive variation in news starting points among different countries:
(Deeper dive on this on p.78)
47% of US news consumers use ad-blocking software
Filing this under “I want more data” because it’s too high to believe. I have seen real data on Do Not Track usage which is also crazy high (10+% of page requests to Medium.com) so I’m clearly missing something.
Do you regularly use Ad Blocking software (software you have installed on your device specifically to remove advertisements from news or other websites)?
I’m absolutely amazed that nearly half of online news consumers can figure out browser extensions (let alone on mobile/tablet). Is there a default setting I’m missing somewhere?
Or… is the question getting misinterpreted?
