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Abstract
The growing use of social media like Facebook and Twitter is in the process of changing how news is produced, disseminated, and discussed. But so far, we have only a preliminary understanding of (1) how important social media are as sources of news relative to other media, (2) the extent to which people use them to find news, (3) how many use them to engage in more participatory forms of news use, and (4) whether these developments are similar within countries with otherwise comparable levels of technological development. Based on data from a cross-country online survey of news media use, we present a comparative analysis of the relative importance of social media for news in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, covering eight developed democracies with different media systems. We show that television remains both the most widely used and most important source of news in all these countries, and that even print newspapers are still more widely used and seen as more important sources of news than social media. We identify a set of similarities in terms of the growing importance of social media as part of people’s cross-media news habits, but also important country-to-country differences, in particular in terms of how widespread the more active and participatory forms of media use are. Surprisingly, these differences do not correspond to differences in levels of internet use, suggesting that more than mere availability shapes the role of social media as parts of people’s news habits.
Notes
1. International Telecommunication Union.
2. International Telecommunication Union, Pew Global Attitudes, http://www.pewglobal.org/2012/12/12/social-networking-popular-across-globe/.
3. All surveys, whether face-to-face, paper-based, done by telephone, or conducted online, face problems of bias determined in part by practical constraints, in part by people’s reluctance to take part, and in part by lack of information about the population. The Reuters Institute Digital News Survey relies on YouGov’s online panels, weighted to represent the adult online population of each country covered here. YouGov use targeted quota sampling as opposed to random probability sampling and, like many other online panel surveys (e.g. Papathanassopoulos et al. Citation2013), uses a matching procedure to deliver the equivalent of a probability sample on the basis of specified demographic attributes. As internet use grows and the problems of doing land line-based telephone surveys mount, this approach is becoming increasingly widespread in the social sciences due to its ability to produce robust data at a reasonable cost.
5. With respect to the 18–24-year-old respondents, keeping in mind the data limitations discussed above, news websites are as frequently mentioned as amongst the ways in which this younger generation find news online, social media are more frequently mentioned (and in two countries, Spain and the United States, more frequently mentioned than any other way of finding news) and, interestingly, search engines are less frequently mentioned.
6. Our data, with the limitations that come with the small sample size, suggest that 18–24-year-olds in most countries only marginally more frequently use social networking sites to share or comment on news stories, and otherwise differ very little from the general population. Only in the United Kingdom and the United States are the differences larger than the margin of error.