TRADITION GIVES TRUST A BOOST

Credibility survey shows why Old Media trumps Social

Though there has been an overall fall in trustworthiness of news, the mainstream old media continues to enjoy greater credibilty than the upstart social media, a survey revealed on Thursday.

The latest Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found high scepticism about news and comment, with 33 per cent of more than 70,000 consumers polled in 36 countries saying they can’t rely on the news to be true.

Only 24 per cent of people said social media did a good job separating fact from fiction, compared to 40 per cent for mainstream media.

“Although mainstream media is not trusted, it is still trusted twice as much for separating fact from fiction as social media,” Nic Newman, lead author of the sixth annual Digital News Report, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“Fake news could be the best thing that has happened to journalism in a long while. It’s an opportunity to re-establish the value of mainstream brands and focus on quality.”

Newman said this has led to a hike in digital subscriptions to news organisations in the United States, with 16 per cent now prepared to pay for news compared to 9 per cent, and evidence that more people might be prepared to pay elsewhere.

The study finds that WhatsApp is emerging as one of the important ways to discover news.

In Malaysia, more than 50 per cent of those surveyed said they used WhatsApp for news at least once a week.

But in the US, the figure was only 3 per cent, and in the UK it was 5 per cent.

Facebook remains the most popular social media and messaging service for news engagement. But it adds that the use of Facebook for news had dipped in more than half of all the territories where a year-on-year comparison was possible.

By contrast, sharing news sto- ries and chatting about them appears to be on the rise within private instant messaging apps, and WhatsApp in particular.

According to the report, WhatsApp is now the second most popular social service for news in nine of the 36 locations, and the third most popular platform in a further five countries.