Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The Pew Research Center’s latest report supports much of what we already know about news media: Print is dying, digital is growing, and the future lies with mobile. What stand out are the findings about our news sharing habits, which suggest that sharing overwhelmingly remains a low-tech, offline activity.

Despite huge growth in the use of social networks, 85 percent of US adults still prefer to share news by word of mouth rather than digitally, according to Pew. That’s not surprising if the news comes from a traditional medium, such as newspapers or TV, but even consumers who primarily got their news online were nearly three times more likely to share the news verbally than to post on social media, according to the report.In fact, active engagement with news on social media is relatively low in general.

The proportion of people who often liked, commented, posted, and shared news was less than 16 percent, while those who did it only sometimes accounted for less than half of those surveyed. Interestingly, although young people are more likely to get their news online, they are no more likely to engage with news online than older people; indeed, Pew found that people over 50 were most likely to comment on news posts. That could be because young adults are less interested in news than their elders and discuss news at lower rates....

Test your knowledge of prominent people and major events in the news, by taking our short 13-question quiz. Then see how you did in comparison with 1,052 randomly sampled adults asked the same questions in a national survey conducted online August 7-14 by the Pew Research Center. The new survey includes a mixture of multiple-choice questions using photographs, maps, charts, and text.

When you finish, you will be able to compare your News IQ with the average American, as well as with the scores of college graduates and those who didn’t attend college; with men and women; and with people your age as well as other ages.

A majority of U.S. adults – 62% – get news on social media, and 18% do so often, according to a new survey by Pew Research Center, conducted in association with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. In 2012, based on a slightly different question, 49% of U.S. adults reported seeing news on social media.1

But which social media sites have the largest portion of users getting news there? How many get news on multiple social media sites? And to what degree are these news consumers seeking online news out versus happening upon it while doing other things?

As part of an ongoing examination of social media and news, Pew Research Center analyzed the scope and characteristics of social media news consumers across nine social networking sites. This study is based on a survey conducted Jan. 12-Feb. 8, 2016, with 4,654 members of Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel.

News plays a varying role across the social networking sites studied.2 Two-thirds of Facebook users (66%) get news on the site, nearly six-in-ten Twitter users (59%) get news on Twitter, and seven-in-ten Reddit users get news on that platform. On Tumblr, the figure sits at 31%, while for the other five social networking sites it is true of only about one-fifth or less of their user bases....