Despite Meta's claims, the public say they get their news from social media
Welcome to Tuesday’s update from Unmade. In today’s members-only post, we share nine takeouts from the latest edition of the Digital News Report launched in Canberra yesterday.
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Local and social - what the public want from news
Once upon a time in a possibly hypothetical scenario, behavioural economists recruited some people for an experiment.
Ahead of time, they told their subjects that there’d be a small reward waiting. The participants were asked to let the researchers know beforehand whether they’d like some chocolate or a piece of fruit. Most people chose fruit.
That was the experiment.
With a second group, they left the choice of reward until it was in front of them. Most chose the chocolate.
I found myself thinking of that while reading the new edition of the Digital News Report, from the University of Canberra’s News & Media Research Centre. It’s the tenth year of what is an authoritative study now conducted across 47 countries in conjunction with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
When you ask people what sort of information they want, they tell you local news. When it comes to what sort of news they consume (or more to the point, pay for) - not so much.
That’s just one of the many challenges for the news industry to be found within the data, which is based on asking the public what they want.
The good news for those who care about public service journalism is that, at least in theory, the public are supportive of pubic service missions like local, world and environmental news.
The bad news - which goes well beyond the scope of the report - is that they don’t seem to want to pay for it directly, in any signifiant numbers at any rate. After an encouraging trend in the 2023 edition, the number of people willing to pay for news is actually slightly down this year.
There’s more bad news in the report - which polls an online sample of 2,000 - too. People say they are increasingly avoiding news, increasingly distrusting the news brands delivering it, and women are leaving the news ecosystem faster than men.
The data also draws a further contrast to Meta’s claim back in February that news “makes up less than 3% of what people around the world see in their Facebook feed.”
Let’s get into the findings…