The Pew Research Center’s latest report supports much of what we already know about news media: Print is dying, digital is growing, and the future lies with mobile. What stand out are the findings about our news sharing habits, which suggest that sharing overwhelmingly remains a low-tech, offline activity.
Despite huge growth in the use of social networks, 85 percent of US adults still prefer to share news by word of mouth rather than digitally, according to Pew. That’s not surprising if the news comes from a traditional medium, such as newspapers or TV, but even consumers who primarily got their news online were nearly three times more likely to share the news verbally than to post on social media, according to the report.In fact, active engagement with news on social media is relatively low in general.
The proportion of people who often liked, commented, posted, and shared news was less than 16 percent, while those who did it only sometimes accounted for less than half of those surveyed. Interestingly, although young people are more likely to get their news online, they are no more likely to engage with news online than older people; indeed, Pew found that people over 50 were most likely to comment on news posts. That could be because young adults are less interested in news than their elders and discuss news at lower rates....
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This chart makes it very clear why the divide between Republicans and Democrats in the US is so wide and how the media has a huge challenge reaching out to supporters of Trump. Trump appears to have achieved his goal not only branding media as "fake news" but convincing his supporters of the fact.
Two key questions to ponder: