The shift to online video for news consumption has reached a tipping point, according to the latest Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, with more people now watching online news video than broadcast TV news in 45 markets covered by the study. Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands are the only three countries tracked by the report where TV news viewing is equal to or has the lead over online video.
While the report notes that actual minutes viewed may still be higher for TV news, it nonetheless reflects a challenging situation for news broadcasters and publishers, with social media playing a growing role in news distribution. The study reports a rising global share of consumers who use Facebook (43 percent), YouTube (34 percent), Instagram (26 percent) and TikTok (20 percent) for news. At the same time, mainstream news organisations have seen video consumption on their own sites and apps decline by an average five percent this year.
“When people use social media and video networks they will often be doing so to consume news from established providers, but increasingly this is part of a more complicated news diet and one where news organisations are having to battle hard for their share,” says the report’s author Jim Egan, Senior Research Associate at the Reuters Institute.
A trust fall
Meanwhile trust in news is on the decline, according to the report, reaching the lowest levels since the Institute started measuring trust in 2015. Having held steady at 40 percent for three years, the proportion of people globally saying they trust news overall dropped to 37 percent this year.
The report argues that it is difficult to disentangle declining trust in news organisations from broader scepticism about political and social institutions, and markets with particularly high levels of political instability, divisive elections, and “a noisier and more fragmented information environment” also tend to see the steepest levels of decline in the public’s trusting of news.
The issue is compounded by the rise of AI chatbots, which are now used by 10 percent of people for news, up from 7 percent last year. Trust in answers from AI chatbots is even lower than overall trust in news, according to the report, at just 20 percent of consumers. This falls to six percent in the UK, the least-trusting market when it comes to AI answers. On the social media front, trust levels were not much better, with the global proportion of consumers who trust news on social media now standing at 22 percent.
“For growing proportions, social media are emerging as the main source of information – but this may well not be because these platforms are a conscious preference and more because they are people’s default exposure to news and current affairs,” says Jim Egan. “Audiences have a keen sense of these environments being less trustworthy, while continuing to rely on them because they remain the most convenient places to encounter other types of information.”
Blurring the lines
Accompanying the growth of news consumption on social media is the ongoing rise of creators and influencers, though the report suggests the use of influencers for news tends to accompany more traditional news sources, rather than replacing them. Only three percent of consumers rely solely on creators for their news, according to the research.
Audiences also tend to see creators as more entertaining and engaging, but less trustworthy and impartial than established outlets. However, the line between these types of news sources is becoming increasingly blurred, as creators evolve into professional media businesses, and established media brands set up their own creator operations.
“It may be tempting for institutional news media to regard these creators as a new threat, but for most audiences these creators are complementary voices, adding freshness and colour to people’s existing news experience,” says Egan. “Established news organisations can utilise the opportunity to learn from what audiences value about the best news creators. For their part, the most successful creators are learning that – for better or worse – they are now running news businesses themselves, with all the challenges that come with the territory. We might expect more collaboration between legacy news media and these emerging news producers as they explore ways of working together for mutual benefit.”
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