REUTERS INSTITUTE DIGITAL NEWS REPORT 2022

June 22, 2022

The 2022 Reuters Institute Digital News Report was released recently.

About:

  • This study, an annual one commissioned by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, tracks how news is consumed in different countries.
  • This year’s report, the eleventh overall, is based on a survey conducted by YouGuv, a British market research and data analytics firm.

What are the major trends highlighted in the report?

  • It flags six major trends which could have wider socio-political implications.
  • Firstly, people are trusting news content less and less. The average level of trust in news, at 42%, was found to be lower than the previous year.
  • Second, consumption of traditional news media declined in nearly all the countries surveyed.
  • Third, the proportion of news consumers who say that they “avoid news” has risen sharply across countries, with the report describing the phenomenon as “selective avoidance”.
  • Fourth, despite small increases in the proportion of people willing to pay for online news (mostly in richer countries), the growth in digital subscriptions for news content seems to be leveling off.
  • Next, “the smartphone has become the dominant way in which most people first access news in the morning”.
  • Finally, news consumption is increasingly happening via social media platforms such as Facebook and TikTok rather than traditional media.

What does the report say about trends in India?

  • India is a strongly mobile-focussed market. 72% of the survey respondents accessed news through smartphones and 35% did so via computers.
  • Also, 84% of the Indian respondents sourced news online, 63% from social media, 59% from television, and 49% from print. YouTube (53%) and WhatsApp (51%) were the top social media platforms for sourcing news.
  • India registered a small increase in the level of trust, with 41% trusting news overall.
  • While legacy print brands and public broadcasters continued to have high trust levels , only a minority — 36% and 35% — felt that the media was free from undue political influence and from undue business influence respectively. 
Source : The Hindu