A Sample of How People Get Their News
In recent, a discussion of how I get my news came up. As a 20-year-old who doesn’t even watch T.V., I resort to social media for all my news. Specifically, I use Snapchat and the articles they provide. The articles are from news sources like CNN, Buzzfeed, Cosmopolitan, People, and many more. I also get my news from Twitter but I do not find it as trustworthy. I decided to interview four young adults about how they get their news. All of them get their news from social media, which did not come as a surprise to me. I made my main focus on Snapchat to see if I was alone in resorting to them for my news. They all knew about the articles on Snapchat and only one person used it as a news source. Looking at what the group said I found that they all get their news from different platforms; Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and even Instagram.
After seeing where young adults got news, I looked towards older adults to see where they got their news. I interviewed another group of four, their ages ranged from 39 to 58, which may not be as reliable as the young adults (smaller range of 19–21) because of the varying ages. Nonetheless, I found that they are getting news from social media as well. My second group of interviews turned more political than my first. I tried to stay consistent with my interviews, but I may have played some bias in my side comments, to gear the conversation more political. One of the people talked about Facebook and how they go there to receive their fake news. That person was the only one of the group to watch T.V. to receive news. The most used social media platform among this group was Facebook. In my personal life, I have found that older adults use Facebook more, which would make sense because I know all the people in the interviews. However, according to Statistica.com, 39.4 million Facebook users are ages 18–24 while 35.4 million users are ages 45–54. As mentioned, because of the bigger gap I did with my second group it is hard to get a clear understanding of my results.
Interviewing only 8 people will of course never give an accurate idea of where people are getting their news. People in my everyday life (the interviewees) are almost all getting their news from social media. I thought that more of my friends and people my age would be using Snapchat as a news source because it is a very popular platform among our age. I find it hard to trust other platforms. Twitter also links to many news articles but you have to go to the search bar to see them. Facebook has had many scandals when it comes to their news, so I stay away from there. I am unaware of any news articles being posted on Instagram, but I am interested to see if that can be a new platform for me to get news. People are getting their news everywhere, especially social media. I believe that as Snapchat grows, so will their importance of being a place to read the news.
