Times are changing in the UK as more people are turning to the internet to get their news and ditching the TV.
One of the things I’ve long argued during the debates surrounding the Online Streaming Act (formerly Bill C-11) and the Online News Act (Bill C-18) is that traditional broadcasters should be focusing on adapting their business models to the internet age rather than clinging to the past where they were once the dominant medium for both entertainment and news. This is because more and more people are moving from expensive and technologically inferior cable TV broadcasts to online sources that are often publishing for free and convenient.
For broadcasters, however, they still rely on techniques like either delaying or not publishing certain stories in an effort to protect their increasingly deprecated medium to distribute their news. This over top of pushing legislation like the aforementioned bills in a bid to punish those who innovated and responded to the technological shift with audiences while rewarding those who are using more traditional methods such as spending days to print wire reports, packaging it with ads, and hand delivering the news to a dwindling number of subscribers. That or spend their days watching CNN or Sportsnet, then rewriting their story scripts and retelling those stories on their own broadcasts afterwards.
Of course, I don’t speak about how audiences are increasingly moving to the internet because I’m pulling something out of my rear end or because I happen to be one of those innovators building a better news experience online. This technological shift is very much observable. After all, we’ve gone from a society where cell phones are growing popular to a society where not owning a cell phone is just a bizarre thing. There’s plenty of statistics out there on how many people use social media platforms.
Still, if those raw numbers aren’t enough, here’s another data point that is worth noting. According to research out of the UK, more people use the internet as their primary source of news as opposed to traditional sources. From The Guardian:
Online platforms have overtaken TV channels as the most popular sources for news in the UK, according to figures described as a “generational shift” in viewing habits.
More than seven out of 10 UK adults (71%) consume online news, said the UK’s communications regulator, slightly ahead of TV, which is used by 70% of adults. Ofcom described the survey result, the first time websites and apps have moved in front of TV, as marking a “generational shift in the balance of news media”.
The presenter of the BBC’s Question Time programme, Fiona Bruce, said the growth of social media as a news source was “worrying”.
Ofcom cited social media as a key factor in the shift. More than half of UK adults (52%) use social media for news, up from 47% in 2023. The most popular social media platforms for news are Facebook, used by three out of 10 adults, followed by YouTube, Instagram and X. The BBC News website and app are used by 18% of adults.
Probably the biggest surprise here is the fact that it took so long for this shift to finally happen. Given the rise of internet sources and social media, you’d think that this threshold would have happened years ago, not today. Still, it was inevitable – especially given the increasingly lower quality of traditional news over the years.
As you can tell from the article, traditional media has, rather than embrace social media, opted instead to spend their days demonizing it. It’s really obvious why they chose to do this. They are losing audiences to online sources and they want to take society back to the bad old days of limited access to news in general. They felt that if they just fight social media by pumping out disinformation long enough, people would just magically return to their television sets and use their TV as their primary source of news.
The thinking, of course, is just as misguided as the major record labels believing that if they just sued enough random people, guilty or not, that everyone would just magically return to the brick and mortar store to buy music again. It’s literally a case of fighting the future. Ultimately, record labels did finally ink deals with online sources and their financial pictures finally started to improve. Critics were right all along that the issue of file-sharing was actually a lack of service. File-sharing was filling the marketplace vacuum left behind by the labels thumbing their nose at the internet, wishing that it would all go away on its own.
That very same thing is happening with traditional news sources. The mainstream media, along with their political pals, has decided to push a huge variety of conspiracy theories such as how TikTok is supposed to be some sort of Chinese government mind control device, that Roblox is a source for terrorism recruiting, that social media will destroy your mind, or whatever other complete and utter nonsense they want to push. Naturally, in the process, traditional media sources are blowing up their own credibility in the process and coming off as little more than people who have a heavy case of projection when they scream “misinformation” while pointing at social media.
The bottom line is that people are growing increasingly tired of putting up with the low quality traditional news sources respective outputs. It’s offensive to many people to be told what to think, and that is precisely what traditional news sources have increasingly been doing in their quest to support whatever political party they happen to be close to. For many online sources, if they did that, people just leave for a different online source, so they have much more pressure to perform well and produce quality news. With so many sources online tailored to specific subjects, the choice and variety is much greater than ever before. Why wait 45 minutes for the one story you want to check out on a broadcast when you can get that same story whenever you like, written by someone who knows the subject inside and out as opposed to an intern that barely knows the subject at all?
There’s little wonder why people are increasingly tuning out traditional broadcasters. The bigger wonder is how traditional broadcasters have held out as a dominant news source for so long. If anything, the more appropriate response to all of this is promoting technological literacy, identifying weaknesses in the system and properly funding resources to help people (such as properly funding mental health initiatives, for instances). Spending our days scapegoating social media and the internet is going to do jack all beyond further harming society in general. So why not actually do things to embrace the technological shift, adapt business models, and promote healthy relationships with technology? It’s certainly better than bashing people younger than boomer age all day long, that’s for sure.
