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[Giorgina Makara]

Thistwelfth edition of our Digital News Report, which is based on data from six continents and 46 markets, reminds us of the different conditions in which journalism operates in many parts of the world, but also about the common challenges faced by publishers around weak audience engagement and low trust in an age of abundant digital and social media. The overall story is captured in this Executive Summary, followed by chapters containing additional analysis, and then individual country and market pages.

Our data show how the various shocks of the last few years, including the war in Ukraine and the Coronavirus pandemic, have accelerated structural shifts towards more digital, mobile, and platform-dominated media environments, with further implications for the business models and formats of journalism.

When it comes to news, audiences say they pay more attention to celebrities, influencers, and social media personalities than journalists in networks like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. This contrasts sharply with Facebook and Twitter, where news media and journalists are still central to the conversation.

Much of the public is sceptical of the algorithms used to select what they see via search engines, social media, and other platforms. Less than a third (30%) say that having stories selected for me on the basis of previous consumption is a good way to get news, 6 percentage points lower than when we last asked the question in 2016. Despite this, on average, users still slightly prefer news selected this way to that chosen by editors or journalists (27%), suggesting that worries about algorithms are part of a wider concern about news and how it is selected.

Despite hopes that the internet could widen democratic debate, we find fewer people are now participating in online news than in the recent past. Aggregated across markets, only around a fifth (22%) are now active participators, with around half (47%) not participating in news at all. In the UK and United States, the proportion of active participators have fallen by more than 10 percentage points since 2016. Across countries we find that this group tends to be male, better educated, and more partisan in their political views.

Public media brands are amongst those with the highest levels of trust in many Northern European countries, but reach has been declining with younger audiences. This is important because we find that those that use these services most frequently are more likely to see them as important personally and for society. These findings suggest that maintaining the breadth of public service reach remains critical for future legitimacy and especially with younger groups.

Consumption of traditional media, such as TV and print, continues to fall in most markets, with online and social consumption not making up the gap. Our data show that online consumers are accessing news less frequently than in the past and are also becoming less interested. Despite the political and economic threats facing many people, fewer than half (48%) of our aggregate sample now say they are very or extremely interested in news, down from 63% in 2017.

Meanwhile, the proportion of news consumers who say they avoid news, often or sometimes, remains close to all-time highs at 36% across markets. We find that this group splits between (a) those who are trying to periodically avoid all sources of news and (b) those that are trying to specifically restrict their news usage at particular times or for certain topics. News avoiders are more likely to say they are interested in positive or solutions-based journalism and less interested in the big stories of the day.

Across countries the majority of online users say they still prefer to read the news rather than watch or listen to it. Text provides more speed and control in accessing information, but in a few countries, such as the Philippines and Thailand, respondents now say they prefer video to text. Video news consumption has been growing steadily across markets, with most video content now accessed via third-party platforms such as YouTube and Facebook.

News podcasting continues to resonate with educated and younger audiences but remains a minority activity overall. Around a third (34%) access a podcast monthly, with 12% accessing a show relating to news and current affairs. Our research finds that deep dive podcasts, inspired by The Daily from the New York Times, along with extended chat shows, such as The Joe Rogan Experience, are the most widely consumed across markets. We also identify the growing popularity of video-led or hybrid news podcasts.

We continue to monitor the main access points to online news and examine the impact on consumption with different groups. Every year, we see direct access to apps and websites becoming less important and social media becoming more important due to their ubiquity and convenience. At an aggregate level, we reached a tipping point in the last few years, with social media preference (30%) now stretching its lead over direct access (22%).

But there have been much more dramatic shifts in the networks used by younger audiences in the last few years. In the following chart, we illustrate how interest in Facebook has waned much faster for under-25s, with attention shifting first to Instagram and Snapchat and now to TikTok. The controversial Chinese-owned app has overtaken Twitter and Snapchat with this group and now has a similar reach to Facebook itself. Other networks such as Discord (15%) and Twitch (12%) are also more widely used by this demographic.

This chart illustrates how attention has shifted, from a few big networks that drove substantial traffic to news websites to a much wider range of apps that require more investment in bespoke content and offer fewer opportunities to post links.

Although the averages for TikTok are relatively low, usage is much higher with younger groups and in some Asia-Pacific, Latin American, and African countries. It has played a role in spreading both information and misinformation in recent elections in Kenya3 and Brazil4 and has grown strongly in parts of Eastern Europe, where the Ukrainian conflict increased its profile.

This year we have returned to questions we asked first in 2021 to understand more about where audiences pay attention when using different networks.5 We find that, while mainstream journalists often lead conversations around news in Twitter and Facebook, they struggle to get attention in newer networks like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, where personalities, influencers, and ordinary people are often more prominent, even when it comes to conversations around news.

Digging further into the data, we find interesting country and regional differences. TikTok is used much more for political news in Peru, where it has been used by students to organise political protests, as well as in Kenya and Brazil, than it is in the United States, Canada, or Singapore.

Since then, we find that people in many countries are less happy about the selection of content both from algorithms and from journalists. These changes are not significant in all markets, but there has been a bigger fall in satisfaction in content-based algorithms amongst younger users (who rely the most on them).

Given lower satisfaction with some algorithmic selection, it is not surprising to find that around 65% of younger users (under-35s) and 55% of older ones (35+) have tried to influence story selection by following or unfollowing, muting or blocking, or changing other settings.

None of this means that audiences prefer news selected by journalists and editors, perhaps because many see these traditional sources as also laden with agendas and biases. Indeed, for all the criticism of algorithms, it is notable that content based on previous reading/watching history is still preferred, on average, when compared with selection by journalists across all ages and segments.

We find that many measures of open participation, such as sharing and commenting, have declined across countries, with a minority of active users making most of the noise. Looking back, we can detect a period of peak sharing in some markets between 2016 and 2019, primarily driven by Facebook and by divisive events such as the election of Donald Trump in the United States, the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, and the vote on Catalan independence in Spain. But since then, online participation has shifted to some extent into closed networks such as WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and Discord, where people can have private or semi-private conversations with trusted friends in a less toxic atmosphere.

The group that participates in news has always been different from the general population, but these data suggest that online participation may have become more influenced by unrepresentative politically committed groups over the last few years as mainstream users disconnect or move some of their discussions to more private spaces. Publishers need to be aware of these changes and find ways to broaden and deepen engagement with the more passive or reactive majority.

When looking at the types of misinformation that people claim to see, we find that dubious health claims around COVID-19, including from anti-vaccination groups, are still widespread, along with false or misleading information about politics. In Slovakia, one of the countries bordering Ukraine, almost half of our sample said they had seen misinformation about the Ukraine conflict in the previous week, around twice the proportion that said this in the UK, United States, or Japan.

Taken together, what are we to make of these changes in the platform environment? Our reliance on social media continues to grow, but a growing variety of different platforms now competes to serve different purposes in our lives, with news often becoming less central to how they work. At the same time, we seem to be less happy about the way news content is surfaced (algorithms), the accuracy of the content (misinformation), and the quality of debate (participation). Newer platforms like Instagram and TikTok, with more visual content, are optimised better for younger users, but they often require more bespoke investment from publishers with little return in terms of traffic or revenue. With further innovation on the way, fuelled by artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, publishers will need to be more focused than ever on defining how these intermediaries can help drive new users and deeper connections whilst contributing to their core businesses.

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