Young people inform themselves via social media

STUDY Young adults between the ages of 16 and 29 are using fewer and fewer information media that focus on hard news. Instead, they are increasingly informing themselves via social media channels, which primarily disseminate soft news, or they are being lost as information users altogether because they invest their time in entertainment offerings. These are the findings of the fög - Forschungsinstitut Öffentlichkeit und Gesellschaft / University of Zurich in its sixth edition of the yearbook Qualität der Medien. Usage data from a survey published in this yearbook, which has been conducted annually since 2009 in cooperation with the market research institute GfK, shows that information journalism has a serious problem with young users. Between 2009 and 2015, the proportion of young adults between the ages of 16 and 29 who regularly access professional information from the press, radio or television declined significantly. In 2015, for example, 56% of the young adults surveyed stated that they never use a subscription newspaper. In 2009, the figure was still 35%. It is worth noting that this decline in the use of traditional information services is not compensated for by the use of professional online news services. The decline in the use of traditional news offerings is therefore not compensated for among young adults by the increased use of professional online news offerings.Soft news dominates social mediaInstead, young people are increasingly only obtaining information via alternative channels, above all social media, or they are completely lost as information users because they primarily consume entertainment content. News consumption via social media goes hand in hand with an increased use of low-quality posts, and an analysis of the most virally distributed media posts on social media shows that these are above average entertaining, emotionally charged or event-related, i.e. short news items that are difficult to categorize. People who consume news via social networks therefore perceive the world more via episodic soft news topics than people who directly access professional news media.Digitization weakens financiallyThese shifts in usage towards online and social media are part of major upheavals in the Swiss media system. Digitalization and globalization are affecting the Swiss media in several ways and contributing to the structural weakness of information journalism. The willingness to pay for online news remains low, online advertising revenues remain far below expectations and user aversion to advertising on online platforms is pronounced. The advertising markets are also increasingly becoming the domain of global tech giants Google and Facebook, which have recently entered the publishing business in order to complete the digital fingerprint of their users and thus become even more attractive to the advertising industry. As a result, the financing difficulties of information journalism continue to increase. The recent cooperation between Ringier, Swisscom and SRG in the advertising market can be seen as an attempt to strengthen the defenses of domestic media providers against increased competition from global providers. However, this opens up new rifts with the other Swiss media organizations that are not participating in this cooperation.Growing politicization, growing enemy image of SRGAs information media run into economic difficulties, they become susceptible to economic and political influence. In recent years, exponents of the national-conservative camp, particularly in German-speaking Switzerland, have succeeded in politically repositioning press titles (Weltwoche), acquiring them (Basler Zeitung) or exerting pressure on them (NZZ). The structural weakness of the information media has also changed the debate on media policy in Switzerland. Evaluations of the media coverage of the revision of the RTVA confirm that the national conservative criticism of the SRG is successfully receiving a broad response in the media and that several private media organizations are stylizing the SRG as the main problem for the current structural crisis of the information media in their reporting. The former media policy consensus that Switzerland, which is culturally diverse and, as a small country, particularly exposed to competition from foreign media providers, needs both a strong public broadcaster and strong private media providers is breaking down.Long-term decline in media qualityThe structural weakness in information journalism is having a measurably negative impact on media content. Our time series show an overall decline in quality for most of the media titles examined since 2010. The lack of financial, personnel and time resources in information journalism is having the greatest impact on classification performance. Episodic news is gaining in importance. As a result, citizens are increasingly being left alone to interpret complex political, social and economic contexts. However, the study also comes to positive findings in individual aspects with regard to media quality: public broadcasting was able to break the two-year negative trend and recorded a significant increase in quality. Private television also improved its quality noticeably compared to the previous year and equaled the best value since the quality measurement began. Of the various new media titles included in the media sample, the recently launched online title watson.ch achieved an average quality score across all media titles with its hybrid strategy (high-quality articles are managed alongside attention-grabbing articles of lower quality) and is even positioned above average in comparison with the other online information media surveyed. Test facility, methodology and further informationThe investigation of the quality of the media takes place on two levels. Firstly, the media structures - i.e. the circulation and use, revenue and ownership of the information media in Switzerland - are examined. In 2014, 149 media titles achieved the coverage rate of 0.5% of the resident population per language region required for this study. In a second step, the 58 most important titles of all media types (press, radio, television, news sites) in the three major language regions of Switzerland are subjected to a quality analysis based on the characteristics of diversity, relevance, topicality and professionalism. Further information on the methodology, the underlying understanding of quality and the financing of the yearbook can be found at: www.foeg.uzh.ch.