Pew Research on online news consumption

The Pew Research Center has compiled some key findings about the way Americans get news online as well as how digital newsrooms in the U.S. are doing.

The findings are drawn from recent Pew Research Center surveys and analyses. Pew offers them on the heels of the recent Online News Association annual conference, which took place in New Orleans Sept. 12–14. Here are some of the findings Pew highlighted:

• The percent of Americans who prefer to get their news online is on the rise. In 2018, 34 percent of U.S. adults said they preferred to get news online, Pew says. That’s compared with 28 percent in 2016. TV is still the most popular source of news, with 44 percent of Americans expressing a preference for TV.

• An almost equal percent of Americans prefer to get their local news online as prefer the TV. Roughly four-in-ten U.S. adults (37 percent) say they prefer to get their local news via online channels, similar to the percent that prefers TV (41 percent). 

• Employment in digital newsrooms rose 82 percent between 2008 and 2018. The number of digital-native newsroom employees went from some 7,400 to around 13,500 during this 10-year timeframe. This boost of about 6,100 total jobs did not make up for the loss of about 33,000 newspaper newsroom jobs during the same time.

• More Americans get their news on social media than from print papers. In 2018, one in five adults said they often get news on social media. Facebook is the top social media site used for news by Americans: About four in ten Americans (43 percent) get news on this site.

• Americans are skeptical of the information they see on social media. Most of those who tend to get news on social media (57 percent) say they expect the news they see on these platforms to be largely inaccurate. 

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