Getting News From Social Media Outpaces Print, Consumption Trends Even Impact TV
- by Gavin O'Malley @mp_gavin, December 10, 2018
About one-fifth of U.S. adults currently get their news fix from social media, according to the latest findings from the Pew Research Center.
That’s slightly higher than the 16% of people who get their news from print papers, which represents a shift from 2017 when about the same share of consumers got their news from social media and print.
Television continues to hold its position at the top of the news consumption food chain, Pew reports. Indeed, despite steady TV declines since 2016, 49% of consumers still follow the news from that most traditional of channels.
Challenging TV’s long-held dominance, however, 43% of adults now report getting their news from web sites or social media.
Pew also found a significant overlap between respondents who stream TV news and those who get news on broadcast television. In fact, a majority of those who get news from streaming TV often (73%) say they get news on broadcast or cable TV.
Not surprisingly, people of different ages have different news viewing habits. Those who are 65+ are five times as likely as those ages 18 to 29 to regularly get their news from TV.
A large majority of those 65 and older (81%) get news from TV often, as do about two-thirds (65%) of those ages 50 to 64.
However, far fewer young Americans are turning to television news. Only 16% of those ages 18 to 29 and 36% of those ages 30 to 49 get news often from TV.
The basic problem with these Pew studies is their lack of definition of what constitutes "news". They should have asked about varying types of news or subject matter---like sports news, entertainment news, news about international events, news about national politics, local community news, etc. but as this mistake---in my opinion----was made at the outset all we are seeing is a series of updates using very ill-defined, highly subjective, characterizations of "news" as the basis for plotting supposed trends. Too bad.
Also, as the Council for Research Excellence observational study showed ten years ago, consumers tend to overstate their consumption of new and trendy sources and understate their use of "traditional" media. A major problem with recall studies. Too bad that groundbreaking study isn't being repeated today.