Indeed, SNSs overall, and particularly conversational networks such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, are an increasingly significant source for news (Mitchell and 5). At the same time, social network sites (SNSs) are becoming central to the way people experience news. newspapers, television and radio) on their traditional platforms. Still, there has been a decrease in use of legacy news media (e.g. Established news media organisations still produce most of the news consumed today, including that which circulates through social media and aggregators (Domingo, Masip and Costera Meijer 2015). Society is moving from a traditional news cycle dominated by journalism professionals to a more complex information cycle that incorporates ordinary people within the process. The news environment and news consumption practices are changing rapidly.
The study also indicates that these opinion leaders are perceived as central or even crucial to the news-gathering process. There is a widespread presence of opinion leaders in the respondents’ social media feeds, bringing attention to news they otherwise would have missed, and just as important, delivering interpretation and context. While incidental, they nonetheless seem to count on being informed through this medium. The qualitative study reveals that interviewees’ news consumption through social networks is frequent. Interest in news and age also contribute to this phenomenon. Regression analysis of the survey data reveals the primary factor explaining use of news on social media is the habit of using online news services. Drawing on theories of opinion leaders and the concept of incidental news consumption, this article examines news-gathering on social media using a combination of representative survey data and qualitative interviews with young people aged 16–19. What people are exposed to partly depends on the behaviour of their fellow networkers.
The social media feed is made up of a mixture of private and public postings, and news is intertwined with all sorts of activities. Social network sites are becoming essential to how people experience news.