News Media Trends

The share of Americans who say they often get news from a podcast is quite small, at just 7%; 16% of adults say they sometimes do.

The declining public trust in the news media and polarization of news audiences have profound effects on civic life.

Here is how the average adult Twitter user in the U.S. tweeted about the news in 2021, as well as how these patterns have changed since 2015.

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.

In just five years, the percentage of Republicans with at least some trust in national news organizations has been cut in half.

Roughly half of Americans say that they have been getting some (30%) or a lot (18%) of news and info about COVID-19 vaccines on social media.

We’ve updated our series of fact sheets on the U.S. news media industry. Here are some key findings about the state of the industry in 2020.

In the U.S., roughly nine-in-ten adults (93%) get at least some news online (either via mobile or desktop), and the online space has become a host for the digital homes of both legacy news outlets and new, “born on the web” news outlets.

The State of the News Media fact sheets use a range of different methodologies to study the health of the U.S. news industry, including custom analysis of news audience behavior, secondary analysis of industry data and direct reporting to solicit information unavailable elsewhere.