More Americans Turn To Social Media Influencers For News

(Source: MIRS.news, Published 06/20/2025) Around the world, engagement with news sources on television, print, and news websites has fallen, while social media, video platforms and news aggregators have increased, according to a new report from the Reuters Institute.

The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025 released last week found that news influencers, like comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan, not journalists, are leading how news is disseminated, prompting questions about the future of information and journalists.

“What we see for the first time – because we asked these questions and saying in the same way – that podcast is actually more popular – it’s getting more weekly reach – than radio, and I think that’s a really significant change,” said Nic Newman, lead author of the Digital News Report 2025 report.

Along with podcasts, more Americans are also turning to social media as the main source of their news. A February Pew Research Center survey showed the majority of those news influencers were not trained journalists but were increasingly identified by news consumers as journalists.

The Ohio State University Associate Professor of Journalism Nicole Kraft defined news influencers as any other type of social media influencer, but increasingly stepping into the space of “experts in the news of the day and news that’s breaking” and helping them to consume that news in a way that is meaningful to them that they can “trust.”

Kraft said people have historically been trained to see published material or broadcasted material on television as having authority on a topic and those are the spaces traditionally utilized by reporters disseminating the news to the public.

“Now, everyone can be a publisher. I could literally be a publisher in the next five minutes and I can espouse whatever views I feel I want the public to have,” she said.

She said there is also a lack of urgency from the public to want to differentiate between those with authority on a subject and those who just believe in something. Social media just gives them the platform to say whatever they want, whenever they want.

Pew shows 37 percent of people under the age of 30 say they regularly get their news from social media influencers and 77 percent of those media influencers have no background or affiliation with a news organization.

“We don’t, right now as a society, seem to have the desire to differentiate between people who are journalists by training or people that want to convey information based on the ethics of journalistic standards. We’re really just concerned with getting the information on the platform we utilize,” she said.

She said, increasingly, that is through people who mirror a similar opinion. In that regard, the journalist space was co-opted.

“Because there’s a lot of people telling them that we are not trustworthy, and then they have these people who have the aura of being journalists – but aren’t really journalists – so I can clearly trust them more,” she said.

She said there is a desire for people to inform how you should feel, a validation of belief, or an easy judgment call to what is right or wrong.

Pew found 27 percent of media influencers identified as right-leaning and 21 percent as left-leaning and that 63 percent of all news influencers were men.

Kraft said the future challenge for journalists was how to start acting more like influencers to get the information out and regain public trust.

She said the information needed to be more transparent with the sources, personal to the individual, and done in a way that is entertaining.

“People don’t want impartiality. They want to be informed, but they want to be informed in a way that’s meaningful to them,” she said.

She pointed to the Washington Post putting their reporters on TikTok to explain how they did stories, what they learned, and the background of the story, which was a way to connect personally and establish the trust with the individual.

Kraft said early media literacy was one of the biggest things that could be done to help stem the tide of mis- and disinformation that was propagating through news influencers. She said people needed to know how to get real information and how to verify the information.

“People do want to be informed, but right now they’re grabbing low-hanging fruit,” she said.

Michigan State University School of Journalism Associate Professor Perry Parks said journalists were increasingly at a disadvantage to news influencers in the space of conveying what happened on a particular day and the importance of that event.

“What we see with the phenomena of news influencers is that people are less interested in receiving empirically-verified factual information than they claim to be. They’re more interested in getting news in a way that resonates with their emotional and ideological worldviews and ways of thinking and feeling about the world,” Parks said.

He pointed to recent research from Reuters Institute that showed algorithmic created echo chambers aren’t as big of a driver of influence as first thought.

He said authenticity and honesty were the two driving factors for who people looked to trust with the information they received.

“One of the reasons that journalists are at a disadvantage is that we keep telling mainstream journalists that they’re not allowed to have or express a value system, and when they have to reserve any kind of values from the reporting work they’re doing, their work is very tepid,” Parks said.

He said journalists needed more maneuverability to “be their authentic selves” to be able to tell the stories of the day in an emotionally and intellectually engaging way, that still holds to the responsible ethics of reporting.

He said objectivity in the form of telling a balanced story from two sides wasn’t a particularly useful concept anymore.

“One reason is because there’s a part of society that has actually intentionally targeted journalism – good, empirical, true journalism - for delegitimization, irrespective of whatever objective procedures they undertake,” Parks said.

He pointed to the 2020 election and said empirically that former President Joe Biden won.

“Well, now you’re biased, because we know that the official position of the Republican Party and the current administration is that he did not. So you are already not objective, and you’ve already lost me,” he said.

Parks pointed to vaccines, climate change, or any hot-button issue that could be empirically proven true but would turn any story written on it into something controversial.

He said through the counter-opinions the truth gets muddy and confusion sets in for the readers, even in the most straightforward and obviously factual statements.

Parks said journalists have been resistant to the change, which has created a two-tier system of media: One with people not trained to find verified information having the most influence over the public sphere and the trained people being marginalized.

“When you’re presenting verified factual information – which I fully endorse – people don’t just rationally process information, they also process information through values and emotions, so the value-based and emotion-based elements of news also have to be part of the consideration of journalistic storytelling,” Parks said.