The 2018 annual Digital New Review (DNR) by Reuters is a refreshing read for any media execs worried about the talk of social taking over news distribution and ad-blocking millennials dodging their part of consuming advertiser messages with their slice of free content.

It’s a massive report to plough through, but the general story is that social — particularly in the UK — is losing a little of its influence over how people consume news. However, on the flip side, we also have the news that there is only one country in the study of 38 markets where fewer people pay for any of their online news, and that’s Greece. With just 7% of Brits paying for any online news in the past year, we’re pretty much the bottom of the table, and slightly less than half as likely to pay for content than our American cousins the other side of the Atlantic.

What is particularly encouraging about the report this year is that it seems to back up the widely held assumption that there is a flight to quality going on in the news right now. At the very least, there is a shift away from believing everything one reads in social. This is shown by a -2% shift in news consumption via social. It’s also evident no hard-line site like Breitbart, on the right, and The Canary, on the left, being used weekly by more than 1% or 2% of the population. 

Perhaps the most interesting finding is that just 12% of Brits trust news they come across on social. In fact, they are twice as likely to trust a news source presented in search findings. This whole mantra that has been espoused that people trust news that their peers share above the mainstream media is simply not correct. People trust Google to bring them the news twice as much as they do Facebook or Twitter. 

Unfortunately, for news outlets relying on advertising, there is some relatively OK news and then same pretty bad news, which is now fairly old hat. On the plus side, with an ad-blocking rate of 21%, the UK holds a welcome place toward the bottom of the Reuters ad-blocking league table — we’re 34th. However, it is the same old story of the BBC being far and away the most trusted and used news source in the UK. Nearly half of us get our news online from the BBC and nearly two in three do so via television. 

In television this near two-in-three audience share halves when we go to the next-most popular commercial station, ITV. With online we drop from nearly half of UK users accessing BBC news at least weekly to 15% and 14% logging on to The Guardian and Mail Online. Put another way, we are three times as likely to get our online news at the BBC and more than twice as likely to watch tv news at BBC compared to any other station. 

Talking online, the biggest channel now for news is the smartphone. It has literally come from nowhere in the past five years to overtake desktop, with 56% of us choosing to catch up on headlines on the small screen, compared to one in two using a computer. 

So what can we make of it all? Well, the smartphone is taking over, and that will come as little surprise. At the same time, we’re seeing a drop in trust for news shared on social media channels and the hard left- and right-wing sites are virtually irrelevant in our media landscape. Reuters makes the good point that much of the content in British newspapers is commentary and opinion on all sides of political debate, and so people would appear to be less prone to check out news on a site with clear political skew. 

In its vast editorial, accompanying the graphs, Reuters also predicts that given that a free digital reader is worth a tenth of a print reader, more and more news sites are moving to a subscription model. Given that just 7% of the population buys news online — no doubt partly due to being free on the BBC — it must be questioned whether the benefits of a a paywall can be scaled up to large audiences.

What we can say is that trust in news received over social media is waning and the newspapers’ reaction seems to be to putting up a pay wall to allow access to reputable content.