Social media has emerged
as a leading source of news among online users who increasingly access it on
their smartphones, a thinktank said on Wednesday, warning that the embrace of
free news was becoming a challenge for publishers of quality news.
More
than half of online users get their news from Facebook and other social media
platforms, refusing to pay for news and using ad-blocking, which hurts
publishers' revenue, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ)
said.
But
although free news distributed through social platforms creates an opportunity
to reach more readers, it also makes it more difficult for publishers to get
recognised and connect with their audience, the RISJ said in its annual Digital
News Report.
"These
things are happening because of us," Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Reuters
Institute director of research, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone
interview.
"We
prefer news in the digital form because it's convenient but you get what you
pay for. It takes money to do professional journalism."
Facebook is playing an increasingly significant
role in the distribution of online news, with 44 percent of people using it as
their source of news, followed by 19 percent of people using YouTube and 10
percent using Twitter, the report said.
Nielsen
said that in developing countries, where access to independent and reliable news
was limited, there were even more people who relied on social media for news.
"Many
people in Asian and African countries are using mobile phones to get their
online news and in those regions social media is even more important as source
of news," he said.
Thirty-six
percent of people preferred news to be selected for them by algorithms compared
with 30 percent who relied on editors or journalists, although some feared
missing key information or challenging viewpoints, the report said.
For
the first time social media has overtaken television as the main source of news
for 18 to 24-year-olds, with 28 percent of them citing social media as their
main source of news compared with 24 percent who said they watched news on
television.
More
than half of the respondents said they were using smartphones to access news,
with highest levels in Sweden (69 percent), Korea (66 percent) and Switzerland
(61 percent), the study said.
In
Britain and the United States the use of smartphones to access the news has for
the first time overtaken computers and laptops.
The
survey was carried out online in 26 countries in Europe, Asia, North America
and South America.
(Reporting by Magdalena Mis; Editing by Katie
Nguyen; Please credit Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson
Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, corruption and climate
change. Visit news.trust.org)
Representative Image
Source: Reuters
This is dummy text. It is not meant to be read. Accordingly, it is difficult to figure out when to end it. But then, this is dummy text. It is not meant to be read. Period.
ConversionConversion EmoticonEmoticon