The newspaper business has been in the middle of a long and slow decline thanks to the rise of the internet. Now some new research out of the U.K. lays bare how TV news is facing a similar fate.
Online platforms have now overtaken TV for the first time as the most popular resource for news among adult consumers, at 71% versus 70%, according to new research from U.K. communications regulator Ofcom.
This is a significant shift. Not only has TV dominated news for more than 60 years (a period when it overtook newspapers in popularity for news; that was the first blow for broadsheets), but also as online platforms replace broadcasters (and newspapers), the news they carry comes from a much wider set of sources. That’s both a blessing for having more viewpoints and a curse for being significantly harder to vet for accuracy — and consumers are concerned that this will only get worse with the growth of AI.
Ofcom’s larger conclusions may not be a surprise: Newspapers have been in trouble for decades; TV has faced pressure from streaming and online media in other categories like entertainment for years; and AI has a lot to answer for in areas like deepfakes and misinformation. But the research is significant because it gives statistics to how usage is shifting, and Ofcom said it will use the conclusions to help determine what to focus its regulation on in the years ahead.
“Television has dominated people’s news habits since the ’60s, and it still commands really high trust,” said Yih-Choung Teh, Ofcom’s group director for strategy and research, in a statement. “But we’re witnessing a generational shift to online news, which is often seen as less reliable — together with growing fears about misinformation and deepfake content. Ofcom wants to secure high-quality news for the next generation, so we’re kicking off a review of the public service media that help underpin the U.K.’s democracy and public debate.”
Ofcom has been running annual surveys on news consumption since 2017. This year it canvassed over 5,000 adults both online and face-to-face.
Face the news
Even as online news as a broader category continues to have a disruptive force in the media market, getting online if you’re a publisher is not exactly a panacea. Online news outlets are also seeing their audiences get eroded by newer kids on the block: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and X/Twitter all make the list of top 10 news sources in the survey.
Some of this is a little ironic. There’s been a rising controversy of fake news created and disseminated on platforms like Facebook, YouTube, X/Twitter and more over the last decade, and regulators and lawmakers have definitely taken notice. At the same time, and perhaps related to that heat, Facebook has moved to de-emphasize news on its platform, killing its own Facebook News effort earlier this year.
Yet news continues to be the powerful heartbeat of how people engage on these platforms. Some 30% of respondents said that they got their news from Facebook, putting it on par with the broadcaster ITV. Google-owned YouTube saw its share spike 12 percentage points to 19%.
TikTok did not make it into the top 10 — yet? — but it’s growing fast. Around 11% of adults said that it’s a source for news, compared to just 1% in 2020.
Users between the ages of 12 and 15 have embraced news on TikTok in a big way. The ByteDance-owned short video platform was named by 30% of younger respondents as their go-to for news, with 12% describing it as their main source of news.
Some 27% said they used YouTube for news, while Facebook and Instagram each registered with 21% of respondents. Snapchat and WhatsApp came in at 16%, with X/Twitter at 10%. (Interestingly, BBC continues to be a source, too: 36% said that they continue to use it for news, but it’s the only one that stood out.)
The U.K. findings appear to largely mirror trends that are playing out in the U.S. Pew Research earlier this year found that about half of TikTok’s users under the age of 30 are getting politics and news content from the video app.
Don’t trust the process
That trend should not be received without alarm bells. The rise of internet and user-generated content go hand in hand with a faster and looser idea of what constitutes news — and how that can be exploited.
Election cycles continue to be the most acute examples of that. During the U.K. General Election earlier this year, Ofcom said that 60% of respondents in its survey recalled seeing false or misleading information, with 10% saying they saw this kind of content “several times a day.”
On top of that, 57% of respondents said they were worried about getting conned by deepfake content, with 27% saying they had already encountered some.
To be fair, as you can see from the table below, TV, newspapers and radio all still have a lot to do to gain more trust from consumers, too. The bigger effort should be to ensure that news does not simply become a race to the bottom.
