Over the last decade, social networking sites have become a prominent aspect of the online culture. As more and more people set up accounts on these sites, they've become a fantastic medium for sharing and spreading news. In the Reuters Institute Digital News Report for 2014, researchers were able to determine what percentage of various nations share news over social media and email. At 54%, the Brazilian population blows away the rest world. Italy, where 44% of its population shares news online, is second, followed closely by Spain at 40%. The United States and Finland round out the top five at 35% and 24% respectively.
Facebook dominates the social media market, but the popularity of other networks differs from country to country
Facebook is the clear front runner in the social media world. Researchers found that 60% of those
surveyed use the site, while over half of them (35%) use the medium for sharing and spreading news. YouTube also has a prevalent audience, sitting comfortably at 52% aggregate use. However, only 15% of YouTube users use the site for spreading news, far less than those on Facebook. Twitter is next on the list at 19% aggregate use and 9% use for news. While worldwide overviews paint a clear picture, the social media world is actually far more diverse. For example, Facebook and YouTube users in the United States use the mediums for news a bit more than the international average at 37% and 17% respectively. Similarly, Twitter users in Spain and the United Kingdom share news far more than anywhere else. 21% of Spanish and 12% of British Twitter users reported using the medium to spread news.
An analysis of multiple countries has shown that online journalism has burgeoned in the past several years. For example, according to research conducted, countries such as Finland (80%) and Italy (84%) consume news in the formats of lists and stories. This category appears to be the most popular method of news consumption as countries such as Brazil and Japan have over 80% of their population utilizing this format. It can also be reasonably inferred that the use of social media for news, as discussed previously, has nurtured the growth of online journalism as many of these social media utilize the format of displaying news with lists and stories. One interesting note from this research is that for all countries surveyed, news in the form of text by far dominates news in the form of audio, videos, or live pages. However, this difference can be partly attributed to the screen size of the mobile device.
Growth of Virtual Journalism and Social Media in Graphics:
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