The Good, Bad and Ugly: Essential takeaways for local news from the 2024 Reuters Digital News Report

I look forward to the annual release by Reuters of their Digital News Report in the way that kids eagerly await Christmas morning. I can’t wait to “unwrap” the data in this comprehensive and global annual survey of digital news habits. I know, I’m a nerd! But a treasure trove of actionable insight is packed into this report and I consider it essential reading for anyone seeking to steer an organization to meet the demands of news consumers. I also recognize the report is 167 pages. So here are my essential takeaways for local news leaders.

Three key trends stand out:

  • First, the traditional pathways to news continue to be disrupted. Especially among younger audiences, direct traffic to traditional online news sources is declining. Social and search lead as the top pathways to news, with only 22% saying they go directly to a news site online. Meanwhile, both social and search face further disruption: platforms like Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) have deprioritized news (FB) and links (X); and the future of search referrals to news sites is threatened as AI-powered search results become the norm.
  • Second, there is a shift especially among younger audiences toward video news formats, both short form and longer form. YouTube in particular has grown as a source for news. At the same time, nontraditional sources like influencers and partisan voices are gaining the most new audiences.
  • Third, when it comes to trust in news, local TV news and local newspapers lead the way, earning far more trust than their national counterparts. However, news avoidance and feeling overwhelmed by the news are pervasive, with about 40% of news consumers globally reporting these reactions to news.

Here in 11 charts, are some of the most noteworthy finds from the study. You can read the full 167-page 2024 Reuters Digital News Report here.

News trust and news avoidance

It’s well known that trust in news has eroded significantly in recent years. However, as Gallup has noted in its own research, almost all of that loss of trust in traditional news sources has been driven by Republican-affiliated news consumers. In the most recent Reuters survey, the erosion in news trust stabilized.

Perhaps the most positive finding in the entire report was that local news outlets — especially TV news but also print/digital — enjoyed by far the highest “net” trust scores among audiences (“net” trust score takes those who trust a source and subtracts those who distrust a source.)

For example, local TV news has a net trust score of 45, and local print/digital news has a net trust score of 40. By contrast, The New York Times has a net trust of 20; CNN has a net trust of 11; and Fox News has a net trust score of 0.

Local news also performed best among audiences in every age cohort as the kind of news that they were most interested in following.

Countering these positive trends around news trust is the rise in active news avoidance and a feeling of being overwhelmed by the news.

Globally, news avoidance has been steadily on the rise, up 29% since 2017.

Pathways to news

Social media and search outpace direct traffic as pathways to finding news. Newsletters and alerts, each of which enable news outlets to have more direct, opt-in relationships with their audiences, become even more important as search and social media referrals face further disruption. Notably, news aggregators have risen as a new pathway to news. The U.S. overindexes here, with Newsbreak alone accounting for 9% of pathways to news.

Since 2013, print as a source for news has plunged from 47% to 16%, while TV as a source for news has fallen from 72% to 51%. Online has remained relatively stable overall in the 75% range, while social media as a source for news has plateaued after years of growth.

Mobile phones overtook desktop computers all the way back in 2017 as the primary device for consuming news. While data for 2023 was missing, this reordering of device use has remained stable in recent years.

The ascendance of video, and news influencers

The 2024 Reuters Digital News Report finds a marked shift toward increased use of video as a source for news; as well as a measurable rise in popularity of creators, influencers and partisan voices at the expense of traditional news voices.

For younger audiences, TikTok and Instagram Reels are top sources for video news. YouTube is the platform that shows the most consistent strengths across all age groups. All of these platforms perform better than legacy online news platforms as video sources for all but the oldest audiences.

In open-ended survey responses, three reasons emerged for the popularity of these “social” videos.

What do these key trends mean for local news? First, the good news is that local news matters — a lot — to audiences across all age groups. And despite those who would would stoke distrust of journalists, local news has by far the most trust from audiences.

At the same time, the data underscore the shifts in the pathways audiences use to find news, and the fracturing of their sources for news, including the rise of “influencers.” As news organizations face even more disruption to both social and search referrals, this report underscores the importance of developing direct audience relationships via methods like newsletters and opt-in alerts; to lean in to video as a storytelling format; and to adopt some of the engagement strategies so effectively used by influencers while maintaining journalistic standards of accuracy.

Read the full 2024 Reuters Digital News Report here, including additional insights into AI uses for news and news subscription trends.