Americans’ Changing Relationship With Local News
More Americans now prefer to get local news online, while fewer turn to TV or print. And most say local news outlets are important to their community.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
More Americans now prefer to get local news online, while fewer turn to TV or print. And most say local news outlets are important to their community.
U.S.-born Latinos mostly get their news in English and prefer it in English, while immigrant Latinos have much more varied habits.
In recent years, several new options have emerged in the social media universe, many of which explicitly present themselves as alternatives to more established social media platforms. Free speech ideals and heated political themes prevail on these sites, which draw praise from their users and skepticism from other Americans.
Fully 70% of U.S. adult Twitter news consumers say they have used Twitter to follow live news events, up from 59% who said this in 2015.
About half (48%) of U.S. adults say they get news from social media “often” or “sometimes,” a 5 percentage point decline compared with 2020. More than half of Twitter users get news on the site regularly.
Roughly half of U.S. adults say they have listened to a podcast in the past year, including one-in-five who report listening at least a few times a week. Most podcast listeners say this experience includes hearing news, which they largely expect to be mostly accurate. Large shares of listeners say they turn to podcasts for entertainment, learning or having something to listen to while doing something else.
While Fox’s audience spans ideologies on the right, its new challengers attract mainly conservatives.
As news outlets morph and multiply, both surveys and passive data collection tools face challenges.
About half of U.S. adults say they get news from social media “often” or “sometimes,” and this use is spread out across a number of different sites. Facebook stands out as a regular source of news for about a third of Americans.
Videos from independent news producers are more likely to cover subjects negatively and discuss conspiracy theories.
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