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Syria Audience Research Study

Free Press Unlimited (2023), iv, 70 pp.

"The key findings suggest that Syrians continue to adopt social media and social messaging apps as the primary channels through which they access news. They appreciate the privacy of messaging apps for communication with friends and family, and check the credibility of news stories with friends, fam ... more

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Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2023

Nic Newman, Richard Fletcher, Kirsten Eddy, Craig T. Robertson, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (eds.)

Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (2023), 158 pp.

"Across markets, only around a fifth of respondents (22%) now say they prefer to start their news journeys with a website or app – that’s down 10 percentage points since 2018. Publishers in a few smaller Northern European markets have managed to buck this trend, but younger groups everywhere are ... showing a weaker connection with news brands’ own websites and apps than previous cohorts – preferring to access news via side-door routes such as social media, search, or mobile aggregators. • Facebook remains one of the most-used social networks overall, but its influence on journalism is declining as it shifts its focus away from news. It also faces new challenges from established networks such as YouTube and vibrant youth-focused networks such as TikTok. The Chinese-owned social network reaches 44% of 18–24s across markets and 20% for news. It is growing fastest in parts of Asia-Pacific, Africa, and Latin America. • When it comes to news, audiences say they pay more attention to celebrities, influencers, and social media personalities than journalists in networks like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. This contrasts sharply with Facebook and Twitter, where news media and journalists are still central to the conversation. • Much of the public is sceptical of the algorithms used to select what they see via search engines, social media, and other platforms. Less than a third (30%) say that having stories selected for me on the basis of previous consumption is a good way to get news, 6 percentage points lower than when we last asked the question in 2016. Despite this, on average, users still slightly prefer news selected this way to that chosen by editors or journalists (27%), suggesting that worries about algorithms are part of a wider concern about news and how it is selected. • Despite hopes that the internet could widen democratic debate, we find fewer people are now participating in online news than in the recent past. Aggregated across markets, only around a fifth (22%) are now active participators, with around half (47%) not participating in news at all. In the UK and United States, the proportion of active participators has fallen by more than 10 percentage points since 2016. Across countries we find that this group tends to be male, better educated, and more partisan in their political vie ws. • Trust in the news has fallen, across markets, by a further 2 percentage points in the last year, reversing in many countries the gains made at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic. On average, four in ten of our total sample (40%) say they trust most news most of the time. Finland remains the country with the highest levels of overall trust (69%), while Greece (19%) has the lowest after a year characterised by heated arguments about press freedom and the independence of the media." (Summary, page 10) more

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Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2024
Deep Insights

Nic Newman, Richard Fletcher, Craig T. Robertson, Amy Ross Arguedas, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (eds.)

Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (2023), 167 pp.

"In many countries, especially outside Europe and the United States, we find a significant further decline in the use of Facebook for news and a growing reliance on a range of alternatives including private messaging apps and video networks. Facebook news consumption is down 4 percentage points, acr ... oss all countries, in the last year. • News use across online platforms is fragmenting, with six networks now reaching at least 10% of our respondents, compared with just two a decade ago. YouTube is used for news by almost a third (31%) of our global sample each week, WhatsApp by around a fifth (21%), while TikTok (13%) has overtaken Twitter (10%), now rebranded X, for the first time. • Linked to these shifts, video is becoming a more important source of online news, especially with younger groups. Short news videos are accessed by two-thirds (66%) of our sample each week, with longer formats attracting around half (51%). The main locus of news video consumption is online platforms (72%) rather than publisher websites (22%), increasing the challenges around monetisation and connection. • Although the platform mix is shifting, the majority continue to identify platforms including social media, search, or aggregators as their main gateway to online news. Across markets, only around a fifth of respondents (22%) identify news websites or apps as their main source of online news – that’s down 10 percentage points on 2018. Publishers in a few Northern European markets have managed to buck this trend, but younger groups everywhere are showing a weaker connection with news brands than they did in the past. • Turning to the sources that people pay most attention to when it comes to news on various platforms, we find an increasing focus on partisan commentators, influencers, and young news creators, especially on YouTube and TikTok. But in social networks such as Facebook and X, traditional news brands and journalists still tend to play a prominent role. • Concern about what is real and what is fake on the internet when it comes to online news has risen by 3 percentage points in the last year with around six in ten (59%) saying they are concerned. The figure is considerably higher in South Africa (81%) and the United States (72%), both countries that have been holding elections this year. • Worries about how to distinguish between trustworthy and untrustworthy content in online platforms is highest for TikTok and X when compared with other online networks. Both platforms have hosted misinformation or conspiracies around stories such as the war in Gaza, and the Princess of Wales’s health, as well as so-called ‘deep fake’ pictures and videos." (Executive summary, page 10) more

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Digital Trust Initiatives: Seeking to Reward Journalistic Ethics Online

Eleonora Maria Mazzoli

Washington, DC: Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) (2023), 28 pp.

"Digital trust initiatives strive to address complex problems and have multiple goals: from empowering users, to improving journalistic practices, to driving audiences and revenues to trusted news sources—and they cannot achieve such goals alone. Bolstering trustworthy news outlets and the content ... they produce in the digital information ecosystem is no easy undertaking. It entails interfacing with a diverse set of stakeholders—readers, journalists, news organizations, platforms, and advertisers—all of whom have distinct behaviors, goals, and incentives. Yet, the potential payback is immense if all the parts in this complex system can be aligned toward a similar objective. Cooperation among these initiatives as well as with other key industry actors in this sector will be key. There are signs that such collaboration is underway. The Journalism Trust Initiative (JTI) emergency protocol powered by NewsGuard aims to support news outlets at risk and will be tested for the first time in Ukraine later this year. It is a potentially promising example of how these initiatives can work together to help newsrooms around the world establish their credibility and transparency in times of crisis. There are also indications of increased cooperation between these initiatives and tech companies. A recently launched project shows the potential for collaboration among multiple digital news trust initiatives and online platforms: the Microsoft Journalism Hub, a resource center built to connect the journalism community with tools, technology, services, and partner programs. Among its features, it includes NewsGuard’s indicator tools and offers support for JTI’s certification program. Digital trust initiatives have set ambitious goals, but their ambitions for change at a global scale remain largely unproven as these efforts are still quite young. Additionally, the opacity of platforms’ content curation and moderation processes, and the lack of data on advertisers’ investment decisions, contributes to a dearth of concrete evidence on how these actors are actually using these indicators and standards—if they are using them at all. The extent to which these initiatives will gain broader traction is yet to be seen." (Conclusions) more

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Strategies for Building Trust in News: What the Public Say They Want Across Four Countries

Sayan Banerjee, Amy Ross Arguedas, Benjamin Toff et al.

Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (2023), 76 pp.

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Trust and the Media: Arguments for the (irr)elevance of a Concept

Peter Jakobsson, Frederik Stiernstedt

Journalism Studies, volume 24, issue 4 (2023), pp. 479-495

"This article provides a discussion of some of the recent research on media trust focusing on arguments for why media trust matters. What are the arguments for why trust is important? Are there reasons to accept these arguments? We identify three distinct arguments in the literature. First, that it ... more

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2023 Edelman Trust Barometer: Global Report

Edelman (2023), 71 slides

"Four Forces That Lead To Polarization: 1. Economic Anxieties: Economic optimism is collapsing around the world, with 24 of 28 countries seeing all-time lows in the number of people who think their families will be better off in five years. 2. Institutional Imbalance: Business is now the sole instit ... more

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Information Ecosystem Assessment: Jordan

Aida Al-Kaisy

Internews (2023), 63 pp.

"This report provides an assessment of the media landscape in Jordan from the perspective of its audiences. Based on audience research, it examines the key issues emerging around media usage, trust, content, and literacy. It is based on data that was collected throughout June and July 2023; the medi ... more

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News for the Powerful and Privileged: How Misrepresentation and Underrepresentation of Disadvantaged Communities Undermine Their Trust in News

Amy Ross Arguedas, Sayan Banerjee, Richard Fletcher et al.

Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (2023), 58 pp.

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Can Fighting Misinformation Have a Negative Spillover Effect? How Warnings for the Threat of Misinformation Can Decrease General News Credibility

Toni Van der Meer, Michael Hameleers, Jakob Ohme

Journalism Studies, volume 24, issue 6 (2023), pp. 803-823

"In the battle against misinformation, do negative spillover effects of communicative efforts intended to protect audiences from inaccurate information exist? Given the relatively limited prevalence of misinformation in people’s news diets, this study explores if the heightened salience of misinfo ... more

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Estudio de mercado y audiencias de medios de comunicación en América Central: Informe comparativo

Proyecto VIMES; Free Press Unlimited; A-01 (2022), 60 pp.

"Los medios investigados en este estudio llegan más que todo a una población de mayor poder adquisitivo y niveles académicos que buscan un periodismo serio, investigativo, de calidad. Es una audiencia bastante involucrada con el medio. Le gusta a esa audiencia sentirse parte del medio de comunica ... more

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Trust in the Internet

Ipsos (2022), 23 pp.

"An international survey reveals that Internet users' trust on the Internet has dropped significantly since 2019. That is among the key findings of a 20-country Ipsos survey released by The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany. Only six in ten (63%) Internet users on average across the 20 countries sai ... more

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Media market and audience study in Central America

Proyecto VIMES; Free Press Unlimited; A-01 (2022), 38 pp.

"The reach of the media outlets researched in this study extends above all to a population with greater purchasing power and educational attainment, who are looking for serious, investigative, quality journalism. This audience likes to feel part of the media outlet, collaborate with it, and have dir ... more

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Snap Judgements: How Audiences Who Lack Trust in News Navigate Information on Digital Platforms

Amy Ross Arguedas, Sumitra Badrinathan, Camila Mont'Alverne, Benjamin Toff, Richard Fletcher, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen

Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (2022), 43 pp.

"In this report, we qualitatively examine how audiences who lack trust in most news organisations in their countries navigate the digital information environment, especially how they make sense of the news they encounter while using social media, messaging applications, or search engines. Drawing on ... a sample of 100 individuals in four countries – Brazil, India, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (US) – we centre on how they use Facebook, WhatsApp, and Google, based on a unique interviewing approach anchored in their concrete everyday experiences. Participants were asked to describe and respond to what they actually saw on their screens as they navigated these platforms in real time while speaking to members of our research team. This research is focused on individuals with minimal trust in most news sources and below-average interest in politics – a population often neglected in audience research since these individuals tend to be least likely to consume news. However, for that same reason, understanding the way they encounter and engage with information online is of particular importance. Indeed, in line with prior survey-based research (Toff et al. 2021c), we found these individuals tended to be indifferent towards, or even opposed to, the idea of receiving news through platforms, which they said they primarily used for other purposes. What we found is that when they did encounter news on platforms and sought to assess how credible the information might be, they often relied on cues for making quick, in-the-moment judgements, which were particularly important since many of these users rarely clicked through to the original sources of news. The mental shortcuts people discussed, summarised in Figure 1, involved (1) pre-existing ideas they held about news in general or specific news brands (where the information was coming from), but also several other factors: (2) social cues from family and friends (who shared or engaged with the news), (3) the tone and wording of headlines (whether or not it was perceived as clickbait), (4) the use of visuals (which they often saw as important evidence for what could or could not be trusted), and (5) the presence of advertising (whether or not information appeared to be sponsored). Additional (6) platform-specific cues also played a role in shaping judgements about what to trust. These involved design decisions around how information appears on platforms (e.g. what labels appear, what is given most prominence), which in turn affect many of these other cues." (Introduction and key findings, page 3) more

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Media Usage and Political Trust Among Young Adults in China: The Role of Media Credibility, Trust in Sources and Political Membership

Qiong Gong, Marc Verboord, Yijing Wang

Global Media and Communication, volume 18, issue 3 (2022), pp. 301-321

"On the basis of an online survey conducted among young Chinese adults, this study examines how the association between media usage and political trust can be explained by three factors: the mediating roles of the perceived credibility of traditional and social media; the moderating roles of trust i ... more

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Estudio de mercado y audiencias de medios de comunicación en América Central: Guatemala

Proyecto VIMES; Free Press Unlimited; A-01 (2022), 70 pp.

"Esta publicación presenta información sobre el mercado actual de los medios de comunicación en Guatemala; sobre cómo la población percibe estos medios y cuáles son los hábitos de la audiencia en el consumo de la información. Además, ofrece recomendaciones para mejorar la viabilidad de los ... more

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Modes of Perception and Issues of Trust in the Media

Anja Wollenberg, Katharina Nötzold (eds.)

Global Media Journal - German Edition, volume 12, issue 2 (2022), various pag.

"What are root causes of trust and distrust in media in different political contexts? How is media use shifted from one source to another with the change of political culture? What factors shape media perception across cultures and across political regimes? Are there commonalities or are they differ ... more

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Listening to the Voices of the Public

Mediation: Biannual Publication of Fondation Hirondelle, issue 8 (2022), 6 pp.

"Faced with a major crisis of confidence since the beginning of the 2010s, traditional media are multiplying initiatives to try to reconnect with their audience, even giving them a real role in the production of information." (Page 1)

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Populist attitudes and politicians’ disinformation accusations: Effects on perceptions of media and politicians

Jana Laura Egelhofer, Ming Boyer, Sophie Lecheler, Loes Aaldering

Journal of Communication, volume 72, issue 6 (2022), pp. 619-632

"Populist politicians increasingly accuse opposing media of spreading disinformation or “fake news.” However, empirical research on the effects of these accusations is scarce. This survey experiment (N = 1,330) shows that disinformation accusations reduce audience members’ trust in the accused ... more

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Trust, But Verify: Factors Affecting Media Trust in Bangladesh

Dhaka: Management and Resources Development Initiative (MRDI) (2022), 76 pp.

"This research study by the Management and Resources Development Initiative (MRDI) was conducted to develop a foundation for understanding audiences' attitudes and behaviour around media trust in Bangladesh. In a complex environment that has undermined news media trust in Bangladesh, the study is me ... more

Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2024 Deep Insights

Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2024
Deep Insights