Most popular news platforms in the U.S. 2021, by age group

Social media was by far the most popular news platform among 18 to 34-year-olds in the United States, with 44 percent of respondents to a survey held in May 2021 saying that they used social networks for news on a daily basis. By comparison, adults over 65 years old mostly used network news to keep up to date.

The decline of newspapers

In the past, the reasons to regularly go out and purchase a print newspaper were many. Used not only for news but also apartment hunting, entertainment, and job searches (among other things), newspapers once served multiple purposes. This is no longer the case, with first television and then the internet taking care of consumer needs once covered by printed papers. Indeed, the paid circulation of daily weekday newspapers in the United States has fallen dramatically since the 1980s with no sign of future improvement.

News consumption habits

A survey on news consumption by gender found that 50 percent of women use either online-only news sites or social media for news each day, and 51 percent of male respondents said the same. Social media was by far the most used daily news platform among U.S. Millennials, and the same was true of Gen Z. One appeal of online news is that it often comes at no cost to the consumer. Paying for news found via digital outlets is not yet commonplace in the United States, with only 21 percent of U.S. consumers responding to a study held in early 2021 reporting having paid for online news content in the last year.