Social Media Users' News Consumption in Canada

Cardiff.
The next speaker at Future of Journalism is Alfred Hermida, who is interested in how news consumption changes as a result of the greater use of social networking platforms. Such users may now start to constitute network publics: mediated public spheres where networking technologies and social interactions influence one another. How does such a networked audience use the news?

The Pew Center has already shown that 75% of U.S. audiences get part of their news via email and other sharing; this mediated sociability is increasingly simply part of what we do, and social media have infiltrated our daily habits. What questions does that raise for the media industry, which has long managed to control its content distribution channels?

Alfred conducted a national survey in Canada to examine how people consume online news; of the 1600 people surveyed, some 1000 also visited social networking sites at least once per month. Half of the Canadian population is on Facebook, some 20% of Canadians are on Twitter. Do such networks play a role in the distribution of news, then?

43% of respondents said they received news from friends and family in their social networks; 20% used their social networks to follow news organisations and/or journalists; 18% received news through friends and family on Twitter, and 10% directly received news updates from news organisations and journalists on Twitter. So, mediation and dissemination through friends and family plays a very important role here.

Indeed, for 71% of social media users, keeping up with news and views was important (even more, 76%, are also interested in social and community events); 63% also wanted to access first-hand information about important events, and 59% thought they were exposed to a much wider range of news and information material.

Interestingly, there don’t seem to be particular differences in the type of news sources these users draw on, regardless of whether people are high, medium, or non-users of social media. Using social media for news generally isn’t supplanting their use of conventional online news sources; social media users are likely to utilise international news sites, commentary sites, and individual blogs, though.

Finally, respondents hadn’t yet made up their minds about the use of social media in general, or Twitter in particular, by news organisations and their journalists; heavy social media users (who also tended to be somewhat younger than the overall average) were more open towards such practices, however.

Social interaction has always affected the dissemination of news; social media spaces simply extend these processes. People who are immersed in this world attach greater value to such news dissemination, and generally prefer to receive such news through friends and family rather than directly from news organisations and journalists; this weakens the editorial role of journalists and editors, and shifts it towards the social circle of users – this is a process of editorial disaggregation.

What we don’t see here is an Internet filter bubble, where they receive a more limited spectrum of news: social media users still have similar habits to the rest of the community, but they are more likely to go to a broader range of sources, locally as well as internationally. It remains to be seen to what extent this is a Canadian phenomenon, of course; these patterns may well be nationally specific.

Further, what needs to be studied is how the dissemination of news through social networks also affects the framing of news reports and shapes news flows – and how overall relationships between audiences and news organisations are affected by all this.