Some 51 percent of all surveyed online users across 26 countries say they use social media as a source of news each week, according to a report recently published by the University of Oxford.
The Digital News Report is completed by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism based at the University of Oxford. It says the combined effects of the rise of social platforms, an accelerating move to mobile devices, and a growing rejection by consumers of online advertising has undermined many of the business models that support quality news.
The report is based on a survey conducted by YouGov of 50,000 online news consumers in 26 countries including the United States, Britain, Germany, France, South Korea, Japan and Brazil. Fieldwork was undertaken between January and February 2016.
According to the report, around 12 percent say social media is their main source of news, and the figure rises to 28 percent among respondents aged 18 to 24. The survey result shows the increasingly influential role played by Facebook in the distribution of online news with 44 percent of respondents using the network to find, read, watch, share, or comment on the news each week.
As people increasingly access news via third party platforms, it "will become harder and harder for most publishers to stand out from the crowd, connect directly with users, and make money," said Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, director of research at the Reuters Institute.
Meanwhile, over 53 percent of all respondents say they use a smartphone to access news, according to the report.
A significant proportion comes into contact with news via a smartphone first thing in the morning, with 16 percent in Britain and 17 percent in the United States, rather than using a TV, radio or newspaper. Of these respondents, almost half of Americans and a third of those in Britain access news first via social media rather than a news app or website.
The move to smartphone goes hand-in-hand with the move to distributed content, and mobile users "increasingly find news coming to them through social media feeds, alerts and notifications," said Nic Newman, lead author of the report.
