Seven facts about news
Take this data seriously or perish
The annual Digital News Report from the University of Canberra has been a valuable data source over the past decade for Australian media. I am going to take a step back today and identify the big picture findings seen in this year’s report. Here are seven facts, based on the data:
Almost everyone uses a mobile phone, and most people use it for news.
Social media is the dominant vehicle for news for young people, while TV fills that role for older people.
News is being consumed less now that it was in 2016 on all media: TV, websites, social media, radio and print.
Online news is more politically differentiated and more left-leaning than offline news
Women are less interested in news than men, and this difference is big and growing in younger people.
Video news is still growing in popularity.
Algorithms are playing a big and growing role in news.
I think these facts are irrefutable. Many of them will seem very obvious to you. If you’re in media, your actions should be lining up with these realities.
News on mobile is the biggest game
I am guilty of wishing that news products didn’t always have to be designed first for mobile. This is a very small screen used by distracted people - it’s a wretched environment for news. But it’s where the majority of consumption happens (67% of people use phones for news).
Social for the young, TV for the old
The Report’s data shows that 18-26 year olds (Gen Z) have swung massively towards consumption of news on social media, and their most popular platforms are Youtube and Instagram. Their radio and print consumption is almost non-existent. Within social, Facebook is less dominant than previously.
The influence of TV is waning, but it remains the biggest source of news because of its heavy use by people over 58.
All news sources are down
Look at the graph above and you will understand instantly why layoffs are ongoing in news media. The question answered by the survey respondents was “Which, if any, of the following have you used in the last week as a source of news?”
The trend in print and radio has been devastating (shedding between a third and half of audience in less than a decade), TV is down substantially, and even digital media have lost news audience.
Online news audiences tend left
The centre of political gravity online is further left than offline. Reasons:
The strong left-wing orientation of the online audiences of The Guardian, The Conversation, and Crikey don’t have offline equivalents.
Online audiences are younger than offline audiences, and young people are much more likely to be left wing.
I verified the last point by checking with the report’s chief author Sora Park, and she kindly sent me the political orientation data by age group (above). I’d not seen this before, so I found it interesting to see the almost perfect division of the sampled group into thirds (left, centre and right - not including the people who didn’t know what the question meant).
Young women aren’t into news
The above graph, also sent to me by Dr Park, shows interest in news by age group from 2021 to 2024. The 18-42 year olds (Gen Z and Y) show a remarkable and growing disparity between male and female attitudes to news. Around twice as many young men as women find news interesting.
Video news is ever more popular
The report finds TikTok, Youtube and Instagram are growing platforms for news, while Facebook is waning. The first two are entirely video platforms. The idea that video is the hot new ticket in news is at least a decade old, but traditional video formats and brands haven’t succeeded digitally. For example TV news packages, at home in a broadcast bulletin, don’t work when cut up online. I find the continuing rise of news video interesting because it is so often a dead end for traditional news outlets.
Algorithms are growing
News is being delivered increasingly through Tiktok, Youtube, and Instagram and they (along with Facebook) serve content to individual users algorithmically. There is no human curation. I think the atomisation of content which occurs in algorithmic environments is destructive for news. There is much less real or perceived common knowledge.
The success of news is not a goal for these platforms, it’s just a by-product of engagement maximisation.
There are several reasons these algorithmic environments are poor for news:
Old news is often served up as if it were fresh - recency isn’t a core attribute - and time context is often missing (for example, on Tiktok)
Similarly, location context is often missing and irrelevant but high-engagement local news is served to out-of-area audiences
Audience awareness of source identity is low
Monetisation is meagre because the platforms are designed for individual creators with no power
A lot of these problems could be addressed or mitigated through product design, but big platform companies have no incentive to boost news or news publishers. For platforms, news as a content category is a source of trouble: there is reputational and legal risk in news publishing that just doesn’t exist in other categories. In terms of business strategy, platforms have no interest in empowering publishers or newsrooms to sit between them and audiences, reducing profit margins and building brands they don’t own.
As everyone in the media industry has learned over the past two decades, those who own the platforms make the rules. The rules inexorably tend to power and profit maximisation.
The war everyone loses
There’s a discrepancy between the ability of news organisations to influence popular and elite thinking (high), and their financial and technological clout (low). This discrepancy has led to a great deal of bad press for technology companies. The war will continue until some new equilibrium is reached. I think the embrace of Donald Trump by some parts of Silicon Valley represents a new front in this war, a kind of counter-intuitive “through-the-alps-by-elephant” manoeuvre. The technologists have gone straight to the source in an effort to circumvent the influence of the storytellers.
How that move changes the dynamic remains to be seen. At bottom, the news industry continues to be outcompeted by algorithms, and this has left most people, particularly the young, worse off as the quality of news available to them degrades. The shrinking popularity of news in all media - as witnessed by the Digital News Report - is symptomatic of this decline.
Thanks for reading, and please leave your thoughts if you’re inclined. Have a great week,
Hal
Great points as always. I have long thought that part of the strategy for news companies has to be marketing to convince people of the importance of news. If you’re Nike you don’t say “exercise is hard and more people prefer not exercising so we’re going to pivot to dressing gowns”, you double down on sport and you focus your marketing efforts on making people want to be the kind of person who exercises. Unfortunately we were too used to the moat around the means of publication so just assumed the value was always going to be inherent and obvious.