Thursday, June 12, 2014

WhatsApp is becoming a key social net work for news

Reuters Institute reporting:
Having shaken up the comfortable old world of news, the social media revolution is now itself fragmenting, with different players dominating different countries.
Reuters Institute experts say it is too early to say whether the new ways in which younger populations encounter, absorb and share new information about their worlds will have deep-rooted social effects, but there is already noticeable divergence in how successful different sources are.
One source, Facebook, has established a powerful position in all 10 countries where YouGov surveyed news consumption habits for the 2014 Digital News Report. But the battle for attention among other social media has thrown up a variety of winners.
WhatsApp is emerging as a key network for news in some countries, while Twitter turns out not to be as popular as British and American journalists often assume. YouTube is a vital conduit for some societies, but almost unused for news in others. The fragmentation of social media is one of the key findings of the 2014 Reuters Institute Digital News Report.
Despite Twitter’s reputation for breaking and distributing news, the survey find that overall Facebook is by far the biggest network with 60% of our online sample using it for any purpose and over a third (35%) saying they used it for news. (see Charts 1/2)
Twitter is widely used for news in the UK (12%), in the US (8%) and especially in Spain (21%) – in part because leading broadcasters (BBC, CNN) and newspapers (El Pais, New York Times, Guardian) have promoted its use in wider coverage. By contrast it is used much less in Germany (3%) and Finland (6%) where Google+ is twice as popular for news. (see Chart 3) In Finland, a domestic aggregation service called Ampparit, seems to be surprisingly popular (12 %)...
https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/documents/report2014/DNR_2014_WhatsApp_emerges_as_key_social_network_for_news___FINAL.pdf

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