Key trends in social and digital news media

BY KRISTEN BIALIK AND KATERINA EVA MATSA

Digital news and social media continue to grow,with mobile devices rapidly becoming one of the most common ways for Americans to get news. As journalistsand media practitioners gather for the annual Online News Association conference,here are some key findings from recent Pew Research Center reports about today’ sdigital news media landscape:

The gap between television and online news consumption is narrowing. As of August 2017,43% of Americans report often getting news online, a share just 7 percentage points lower than the 50% who often get news on television. The gap between the two news platforms was 19 points in early 2016, more than twice as large.

Use of mobile devices for news continues to grow.As of spring 2017, 45% of U.S. adults often get news on a mobile device, up from 36% in 2016 and 21% in 2013. The use of desktop or laptop computers for news remains steady, with 31% saying they often get news this way. In all, 85% of Americans ever get news on a mobile device.

The recent surge has mainly come from growth among older Americans. Roughly twothirds (67%)of those ages 65 and older now get news on a mobile device, a 24-percentage-point jump from 2016 and about three times the share in 2013. Mobile news use also grew among those ages 50 to 64, with about eight-in-ten (79%) now getting news on mobile,about double the share from 2013. households.

Nonwhites and the less educated increasingly say they get news on social media. About threequarters of nonwhites (74%) get news on social media sites, up from 64% in 2016. This means that nonwhites (including all racial and ethnic groups,except non-Hispanic white) are now more likely than whites (64%) to get news on social media.

Americans have low trust in information from social media. Just 5% of web-using U.S. adults have a lot of trust in the information they get from social media, nearly identical to the 4% who said so in 2016. This level of trust is much lower than trust in national and local news organizations, and in information coming from friends and family.

Online news that comes via emails and texts from friends or family is the type of news encounter most likely to result in a follow-up action.Among the five pathways studied, news instances spurred by emails and texts from friends or family elicited the most activity; nearly hree-quarters (73%)of these instances were acted upon in some way.