News consumers around the world are now turning more to social media and video platforms than traditional outlets for information, a report said Tuesday, warning that old-style business models are under threat.<\/p>\n
The year 2026 marks \u201ca significant milestone: for the first time, social media and video network consumption is now ahead of other news sources as the most widely used source of news globally,\u201c\u00a0at 54%, wrote Jim Egan, lead author of the report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.<\/p>\n
The annual report from the institute, attached to the University of Oxford, is a closely-watched tracker of trends reshaping the news media.<\/p>\n
Researchers based their findings on online surveys of almost 100,000 people in 48 countries, run earlier\u00a0this year by pollster\u00a0YouGov.<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s edition found 54% of respondents said they got news from social media or video platforms in the week before the survey \u2014 rising to 56% if AI chatbots like ChatGPT were included.<\/p>\n
That outstripped the 52% who referenced TV news, 51% for newspaper apps or websites, and 21% for radio.<\/p>\n
While it was the first time new platforms topped the old in the average of the global survey, individual countries had already passed the turning point.<\/p>\n
In some countries, though, notably in Europe, traditional media websites and apps remain ahead for now.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is better to think of this more as a drift rather than a shift, but it is nevertheless an important moment,\u201d Egan wrote.<\/p>\n
Across the global survey, three out of 10 respondents said social media or video platforms were their main source of news.<\/p>\n
Among those age 18 to 24, the proportion rose to half.<\/p>\n
Different social networks also breed different usage patterns.<\/p>\n
Most of the respondents visited X or YouTube specifically to find news.<\/p>\n
But on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, users were likelier to stumble across news while doing something else.<\/p>\n
Television remained the leading news source only among those age 45 to 54 and over-55s.<\/p>\n
The responses about traditional media apps and websites were also grim, with none of the age tranches surveyed saying they were their first port of call for news.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis has obvious implications in terms of prospects for audience reach, engagement, and for monetisation potential,\u201d wrote Egan, a former senior executive at the BBC.<\/p>\n
The scale of the challenge in finding the revenues to pay for reporting is clear from the fact that just 17% of respondents said they pay for information online.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, internet giants such as Google and Meta have captured a giant share of the advertising market \u2014 at the expense of traditional media.<\/p>\n
The 180-page report reinforces large-scale trends acting on the media for years, including the growing appetite for video content, increasing power for individual news content creators, and loss of confidence in traditional media.<\/p>\n
That last measure reached an all-time low, with just 37% of respondents saying they trust \u201cmost news most of the time.\u201d<\/p>\n
People are also increasingly turning to AI chatbots for news, which had been the focus of last year\u2019s Reuters Institute report.<\/p>\n
Some 10% of respondents said they used chatbots for news weekly, up from 7% last year.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow to respond to the rapid development and diffusion of generative AI is the biggest 360-degree challenge for today\u2019s news leaders and policymakers,\u201d Egan wrote.<\/p>\n
More broadly, he noted \u201cmarked volatility in many of the indicators\u201d tracked in the report, against a backdrop of increased geopolitical uncertainty.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome of this year\u2019s report makes for unsettling reading, but it is an especially unsettled time both for the news media sector and for the world at large,\u201d Egan wrote.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"News consumers around the world are now turning more to social media and video platforms than traditional outlets…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":41549,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5458,8,24206,1240,12633],"class_list":["post-41548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-japan","tag-google","tag-japan","tag-meta","tag-social-media","tag-youtube"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41548\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}