The number of people globally who initially access news through a website or app has dropped by 10 points since 2018, and younger groups prefer to access news through social media, search or mobile aggregators, according to a report released on Tuesday.
This article isn’t saying much imo, and isn’t really indicating a greater trust in other media sources (in fact it even says, “56% of people say they worry about identifying the difference between real and fake news on the internet”), so much as relying on them over older forms. This isn’t surprising as more people have moved away from cable/satellite tv to relying primarily on the internet for media.
Similarly as news outlets have struggled to maintain any semblance of revenues with this increasing shift to the internet, they’ve been practically forced to a race to the bottom in pricing, hammering their audiences with an overwhelming amount of ads to try to stay in business. This has made more folks inclined to get news from them through social media rather than visit their sites/apps, thereby reducing that revenue stream even more.
At the same time, the few outlets that appeared to better adapt to social media have been continually screwed by being at the whims of their algorithms which can seemingly change with the slightest sign of trouble or greater profits.