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Commuting on public transport has always provided a convenient opportunity to assess changing forms of media consumption. Seventy years ago, you would have seen a sea of heads buried in newspapers. From around 15 years ago, it was eyes glued to screens. At first glance, the picture today is similar, but that misses a subtle difference. Previously those screens tended to show words; now you’ll glimpse the tell-tale flickering of a never-ending stream of bite-sized videos.
The latter shift may seem much more subtle than the former, but I’m not sure that’s true.
Print has been in decline for several decades, but perhaps less appreciated is the cratering in consumption of any written news at all. The share of adults reading news articles online in the US has fallen from 70 to 50 per cent since 2013. The share of Britons and Americans now consuming no conventional news media at all has ballooned from 8 to around 30 per cent. While the decline of print was mainly a problem for newspapers’ bottom lines, the decline in all news consumption is a problem for society.
Social media now dominates. Today, US adults under the age of 50 are more likely to get their news directly from social feeds than from a news article whether in print or online, according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s latest Digital News Report. Trends in most other countries are similar.
These shifts have significant consequences, some of which we are only beginning to appreciate.
On a fundamental level, the move from articles of a few hundred words to 280 characters in the 2010s meant a shift from even the modest amount of detail and subtlety in the average news report to a world of oversimplified takes. Trade-offs and complexity don’t get a look in.
This isn’t just about short formats. Instant feedback in the form of likes and share counts quickly taught people that the best-performing content is generally exaggerated and hostile rather than moderate and nuanced. The emerging media landscape became unfavourable to an educated centrist establishment, but a boon to populists and radicals.
The latest phase of the digital media transition, the rapid rise of short-form video, is arguably an even bigger step-change. Platforms such as TikTok and Instagram now dwarf Facebook, X and Bluesky among young people, and the same shift is under way among adults.
These platforms are fundamentally different. Text-based social media still favoured mainstream journalism, partly because pithy writing helps — and the chronological feed rewarded news. With the pivot to video, the balance tilts the other way. On TikTok and Instagram, the currency is charisma, energy and delivery: being first is less important than being hyper-engaging.
This is borne out in more Reuters data showing that even as social media began to cannibalise news websites, the most prominent news accounts on text-based social platforms were still mainstream journalists and news organisations. In video land, people are more likely to turn to influencers and content creators than traditional sources, not just for lifestyle content but for news.
This is another thumb on the scale for political outsiders. The upstart media is by definition less cosy with establishment politicians, and independence from big legacy brands also means it is free to host and publish what mainstream media would not. Research shows the most recent class of news influencers lean slightly right in terms of their politics, but even those with different politics are anti-establishment.
Shifts in how people listen to the news are part of the same pattern. Podcasts, where the norm is private listening through earphones, are a very different beast from radio, whose culture and content were shaped in an era where a couple or a family might be listening together in the car or the kitchen. This facilitates both a more fragmented landscape and a greater comfort with controversial output. It’s much easier for digital media’s often iconoclastic “manosphere” to blossom in this world than the old one.
In form and function, tone and inbuilt incentives, the emerging media landscape of 2024 is quite different from that of 2014, let alone 2004 or 1994. It would be strange indeed if this did not have an impact on our politics.
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