Americans’ news consumption habits have changed — these days, social media influencers are our town criers and paper boys.
That’s according to the Pew Research Center, which released a new report this week analyzing insights from over 10,000 Americans ages 18 and up regarding how they consumed news this past summer. In addition to offering respondents more traditional options to choose from, such as television, they also included news influencers — individuals who regularly post on social media about current events and have at least 100,000 followers.
Roughly one in every five study participants reported getting their news from such social-media sources. This form of news consumption was most common among adults ages 18 to 29, with 37% of them saying they regularly obtain their news this way. Most who reported relying upon such sources said that news influencers helped them better understand current events – in particular, the 2024 Election – and various social issues.
The Pew Research Center has been investigating news consumption trends for at least a decade, says Luxuan Wang, a Pew research associate and author of the latest study. She told The Story Exchange that researchers have witnessed an “increasing digitization” of people’s news consumption as influencers gain presence and power in the industry. She named conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro, MSNBC correspondent Joy Reid, political activist Charlie Kirk and Fox News host Laura Ingraham as examples.
“From the news consumer side, news influencers are rising as a crucial information source for them,” Wang says. “From the industry side, there are no longer just those traditional news industry news outlets. There are all of these alternative voices outside of traditional … news media, that are attracting a lot of attention.”
Wang isn’t the only one who’s noticed. A new study conducted by New York Magazine, for which the publication interviewed 57 news media leaders about the state of the industry, revealed that all of them anticipated dramatic, digitally-focused changes down the road. It also highlighted the popularity of Apple News especially, which charges subscribers $12.99 per month, along with the broader concerns of a dying news industry.
Research also shows that, as with other forms of news media, the informative influencer world is largely male-dominated. Pew found that 63% of these individuals are men, while only 30% are women. (The remaining 7% were either nonbinary, or their gender couldn’t be determined by researchers, the report states.) The gender gap among consumers is far smaller though, with 23% of women and 19% of men regularly getting their news from influencers, Wang says. Male influencers tend to make their digital homes on YouTube, Facebook and X, while a majority of women influencers exist on TikTok and Instagram, the report finds.
Jessa Lingel, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says this gap is a reflection of “lingering sexism.” She wasn’t completely surprised by the Pew report’s findings, but she was disappointed to learn about the gender breakdown of who’s delivering the news. When it comes to reporting, there is a long-standing societal belief that “men are the experts in the public sphere, and women are experts in private,” Lingel told The Story Exchange. “It’s disappointing that that division is still so powerful that it would show up in such overwhelming ways, at least on Twitter.”
In regards to X, formerly Twitter – an especially large news source for the online consumers – Lingel says the ideological skewing and the gender representation issues result from Elon Musk’s ownership and leadership of the company. “He has been so explicit in his policies about what online discourse should look like on Twitter, in a way that has favored conservative news — in a way that has favored the sort of extremism that is often hostile to women.”
And while conservatives like Musk have long believed that social media apps censor them, Pew’s data reveals that news influencers are actually more likely to see their politically right-leaning views elevated across all platforms. This also includes Facebook, where there are three times as many conservative news influencers as there are liberal ones.
Lingel, who is “a early millennial, late Gen-xer,” says she has witnessed some progress in women’s representation on television over the course of her life, specifically in sports journalism. And, as more and more women ”join in tech workforces, it’ll become more likely that women creative content creators are supported on various platforms,” Lingel says.
While it’s hard for experts to know precisely what the future of news consumption will look like, Lingel says society will see “increasing fragmentation across the news landscape,” along with an influx in tools meant to reveal when something has been produced by artificial intelligence.
As for Pew’s Wang, she expects the digitization of news to continue apace. “We have been tracking trends for a very long time, and there’s some patterns that wouldn’t necessarily change overnight,” she says. But “the increasing use of digital devices” will remain either way.
