NewsBeat

6 NewsBeat August 2018 By LAURA HAZARD OWEN After years of growth, the use of social media for news is falling across the world eople are becoming disenchanted with Facebook for news. The "Trump bump" appears to be sustaining itself. And younger people are more likely to donate money to a news organization than older people. These are some of the findings from a big new report out Thursday from Oxford's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. The Reuters Institute's Digital News Report for 2018 surveyed more than 74,000 people in 37 countries about their digital news consumption. (Included in the report for the first time this year: Bulgaria.) The research is based on online YouGov surveys earlier this year, followed by face-to- face focus groups in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Brazil on the topics of social media and messaging apps. The report includes a number of findings on fake news, misinformation, and trust in the media; for more on those topics, see this piece by the report's authors, and I'll also include some more info in Friday's fake news column. P Here are some of the most interesting findings from the report: The use of social media (read: Facebook) for news is declining. "For the last seven years we have tracked the key sources for news across major countries and have reported a picture of relentless growth in the use of social media for news," the researchers write. "Now, in many countries, growth has stopped or gone into reverse." This is almost entirely due to changes in Facebook habits. In the U.S., for instance, 39 percent of people said they used Facebook as a source of news in 2018, down 9 percentage points from 2017. And if you look just at young people in the U.S., their use of Facebook for news is down by 20 percent compared to 2017. This isn't true in all countries — "Facebook news usage is up significantly in Malaysia and the Czech Republic — but it's true in most of the ones Reuters looked at. This continues a trend that began last year in countries outside the U.S. Reuters ran most of its research before Facebook's algorithm changes in January 2018. If this can't be blamed on a decision by Facebook, then what does account for it? The researchers suggest that people feel more comfortable moving their discussions to closed messaging apps like WhatsApp (whose use for news across countries has almost tripled since 2014 — though, in the U.S., only four percent of respondents said they get news from it). The people that Reuters spoke with said that they do still find stories on Facebook and Twitter, "but then they will often post them to a WhatsApp group for discussion, often using a screen grab or a headline without a link." "The source is still Facebook because when we're going to share something on WhatsApp, usually the article we've found is on Facebook," a U.S. man in the 20- to 29-year-old age group told the focus group. "So Facebook is still king in that sense." But messaging apps are picking up the slack, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism finds in its 2018 Digital News Report.

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