Instanews

As the public’s news consumption continues to shift, and as the generation that came of age with smartphones begins adulthood, Instagram, the app that old folks such as millennials or Gen Xers think of as a place to post sunset or cute-kid pics, is rapidly rising as a source for news, according to a new study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

A steady 35% of people get news from Facebook, but that’s disproportionately older folks. The study shows that young adults are more likely to use Twitter (31%) or even YouTube (29%) than Facebook (26%) for news. In that 18-24-year-old cohort, fourth place is Instagram with 18%. This is distressing to the Gen Xers who use Instagram to get away from politics, virus spreads, riots, and global affairs, hoping instead for some nice canoeing pictures.

These apps are unreliable, though, in the eyes of most. Only 14% say they trust news from social media. The most credulous seem to be neither the old folks nor the children, but the younger millennials — 24% of 25-34-year-olds trusted news from social media.

It’s not that legacy media are doing that much better — only 29% of the public said they generally trust the news.

Some things don’t change that much. When asked which brands they trust, including the New York Times, HuffPost, BuzzFeed, Fox News, and plenty others, the greatest number gave an old-fashioned answer: the local evening news.