The third report in the Canadian Media Research Consortium’s series on the news landscape in Canada, Social Networks Transforming How Canadians Get the News, was published in April 2011. Its central finding was that many Canadians had come to expect the news to reach them filtered by family, friends and acquaintances rather than only by professional journalists.
Among social media users, 43% said they got their daily news through recommendations from friends and family on sites such as Facebook, the equivalent of about 6.5 million Canadians. By comparison, 66% of all news consumers turned to newspaper websites, 52% to television news sites and 33% to radio news sites. Close to two-thirds of online Canadians valued being able to share content easily; among the young the figure rose to 83%.
The report’s other findings: more than two-thirds of Canadians on social networking sites valued them as a way of keeping up with the news, and more than half said they got a broader range of news there than from traditional media alone. One in three Canadians overall, and one in two young adults, treated social networks as a news source, yet only one in four considered the information reliable. Twitter was emerging as a news channel, with one in five social media users getting news from friends and family there against one in ten from news organisations.
The report was based on an online survey of 1,682 adults conducted by Angus Reid Public Opinion, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points, weighted to Statistics Canada data.