More turn to social media for news: Report

NEW YORK — The number of people globally who initially access news through a website or an app has dropped by 10 points since 2018, with younger groups preferring to access news through social media, search engines or mobile aggregators, according to a report released on Tuesday.

Viewers pay more attention to celebrities, influencers and social media personalities than journalists on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism said in its annual Digital News Report.

TikTok is the fastest growing social network in the report, used by 20 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds for news, up 5 percentage points from last year. Fewer than half of survey respondents expressed much interest in news at all, down sharply from 6 out of 10 in 2017.

"There are no reasonable grounds for expecting that those born in the 2000s will suddenly come to prefer old-fashioned websites, let alone broadcast and print, simply because they grow older," Reuters Institute Director Rasmus Nielsen said in the report, which is based on an online survey of roughly 94,000 adults conducted in 46 markets, including the United States.

Less than a third of respondents said that having stories selected for them based on their previous consumption is a good way to get news, a 6-point decline from 2016, when the survey last asked the question. Yet, people still slightly prefer to have their news chosen by algorithms than by editors or journalists.

Trust in the news has fallen by 2 percentage points in the last year. On average, 40 percent of respondents say they trust news most of the time. The US remains among the lowest in the survey.

Across markets, 56 percent of respondents say they worry about identifying the difference between real and fake news on the internet — up 2 percentage points from last year.

The survey found that 48 percent of respondents say they are very or extremely interested in news, down from 63 percent in 2017.

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism is funded by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Thomson Reuters.

Agencies via Xinhua