Slashdot Mirror
More People Get Their News From Social Media Than Newspapers, Study Finds (engadget.com)
The Pew Research Center has found that more adults get their news from social media than newspapers. "In a survey conducted earlier this year, 20 percent of adults said they often get news via social media while just 16 percent said the same about print newspapers," reports Engadget. "Television topped the list, with 49 percent of respondents saying they get news from TV often while 33 percent and 26 percent of respondents said news websites and radio were significant news sources for them." From the report:
Though television is still the dominant news source for American adults, it has been on a decline -- 57 percent of surveyed adults reported getting their news from television regularly back in 2016. And Pew points out that when you look at online news sources together, so either news websites or social media, it's creeping up to TV as the top source, pulling 43 percent of adults combined. But there are significant differences between age groups. TV is by far the most popular news source for adults aged 50 and over while just 16 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds and 36 percent of 30- to 49-year-olds say they often get news via television. Among the youngest adults (aged 18 to 29), social media is the most popular platform for news, and for 30- to 49-year-olds, websites are the top news source.
That explains a lot.
More seriously: I recently resubscribed to our local newspaper after letting it go for about 4-5 years - before that, I’d been a subscriber for a couple decades. I’m debating if I want to continue. Thing is, the long-form journalism that is the strength of a newspaper has been cut way back - it seems they’re trying to appeal to the younger generation and their short attention span. But what they’ve really managed to do is cut down on the amount of information their product now offers. Not to mention that local news coverage is just about gone, excepting sports.
And the ads! I understand that they can’t rely on classifieds carrying them anymore, but it’s gotten ridiculous. You have to help not through the ads to find the newspaper.
#DeleteChrome
Secular Talk, Dave Packman, The Young Turks. To be honest they're mostly just commenting on BBC stories and some Al Jazeerez. I'll check CNN & MSNBC but both are more or less the Establishment party line. For general news there's Fark (not the comments section, but the aggregator part).
I think folks stopped caring about newspapers when they started to be 24/7 nonstop corporate propaganda. Back in the day newspapers would muckrake and dig up dirt on powerful men. That was something worth paying for. These days those men either buy out or sue the papers until they toe the line. What's the point.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
...to death for survival these days, anything goes it seems.
I'm older than 49 myself, and I def. do not trust general media, so I watch a lot of different media and make a "balanced" judgement based on observations from the various sources in order to figure out what "really" happens.
We've had numerous examples on how news-media can't be 100 percent trusted, for example - remember the independent journalist Tim Pool decided to see how it was in Sweden? Well, he traveled to the questionable areas that allegedly had lots of trouble, and he noticed that the police was following him around, warning him not to stick around.
Interestingly enough, that's not the story media in Sweden presented to the majority of the population on the national TV channel, they knew "nothing" of this, and denied everything, despite that - anyone who wanted could watch it on Tim Pool's youtube channel, uncut videos with 100% irrefutable evidence, because he was there, and filmed it all, nothing blurry, nothing cut or censored away, he just uncovered the pure reality.
And media lied it away, to make everything sound "Normal" to the Swedish population. From that day, those of us who wanted it - had clear evidence that it's being tampered with on a high level. To me - well, I suspected it all along, but - I had some kind of childish naive hope that in rich democratic countries like the Scandinavian countries, we would still be spared this, but no. Sadly not.
So who are we to trust? Trust no one - only your own down to earth judgement, don't buy the first story you hear, find a second opinion - and a third one, and absolutely NOT go by "popular opinion", always seek the truth, not opinions alone.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
A few years ago there was a survey asking people where they got their news. The number one TV show people reported getting news from was The Daily Show, a comedy show.
So "news" these days, to most people, means Facebook or a comedian.
I find it interesting, and scary, to compare various news sources on the same day. You'll get a COMPLETELY different view of the world depending on which news source(s) you choose. Ever wonder why the heck the guy you're arguing with is so F-ing stupid, why he can't see things that are obvious to you? He's living in an entirely different world, that's why.
Every day CNN's front page has a story about a bad cop, or a cop who royally screwed up. It may be an update about something a bad cop did a year ago. These stories are mostly true. Also every day Fox has a story about a cop beimg hero, doing something generous or brave. These stories are pretty much true as well. Readers get a 180 degree completely opposite opinion of cops, depending on which stories their news source covers.
Same on any other topic. MSNBC will run a stories every day with a particular slant on the topic, the Washington Times will run some will the opposite slant - all true(ish). The Daily Show will do jokes that sound like news stories, slanted far enough to become fiction.
The other guy can't see your point of view because the news of the world in his world is the opposite of what you see every day. That's why he's being ridiculous - and you're being just as ridiculous, if you're like 95% of people.
That would depend on when you saw the reports on Swedish TV.
There was some coverage after Pool's first two days of walking around Malmo, when he encountered - no trouble. It was later in his visit that he did experience the trouble you describe, and that was also covered in local media - but not a lot, because when there's masked gangs and rioting in your streets, frankly a non-violent encounter happening to some busybody foreign journalist doesn't seem all that newsworthy.
You're insinuating that there was a conspiracy to cover up the truth. To that I say, link or STFU.
Social media is good for friends and family, independent news, and news from all corners of the world. But its infinite (essentially)! Easily distracting and the biggest time sink humanity has ever created.
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
This is nonsense as news is the original social media feed.
... it helps people realize that what is "news" has always been subjective.
It's not like the three big sellers of laundry detergent ads, or the big syndicate sellers of classified and print ads, had some sort of magical truthy dust that made their "news" super accurate.
The headline makes it sound like a bad thing. But in reality, I have a lot of Facebook friends who are into news related to science and tech, as well as politics and current events. They're often posting URLs linking back to relevant news articles of interest. And especially these days, they're all rather careful to pick and choose the sources because of all the "Fake news!" backlash.
(Even if I already know about something that happened that's clearly legitimate news, like a celebrity death or a new tech announcement from Apple or Intel, I try to find a respected news site with the article to link to, vs. some blog page that covered it.)
Facebook is just kind of an aggregator of knowledge people feel like sharing. It helps me find news items of interest without sitting through a whole night's TV news broadcast to get only 30 second summaries of things, and a whole lot of "fluff" I don't care about at all.
Seriously, the good thing about a forum like this is, if someone spouts BS, the people will jump on them. Of course, if it's not BS, they'll still get jumped on, but at least there's a chance of reading both sides.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
News comes FROM a source and is delivered VIA a medium.
Facebook does not participate in journalism or news distribution. People post articles from news media organizations on Facebook and people read them.
Similarly, one doesn't "get their news" from Google News. They get news from Reuters, New York Times, LA Times, Boston Globe, WSJ, etc. and its delivered via Google News.
Of course, one could also "get their news" from the New York Times via their print newspaper, but that's arguably inconsequentially different from reading the NYT online.