News reaches us through many sources and on many devices. The annual study of the Reuters Institute (Oxford) about changing news consumption and the findings for Germany, carried out by the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut, show international trends and developments.
Technical devices and services available for consuming news continue to differentiate further. At the same time, the various options for consuming news are converging, as different types of service can be used on one single device. The technical and content-related base for information transfer within a society and opinion formation are hence changing considerably.
How the population or – respectively - various groups within it, is altering its consumption of news and what role the various technical platforms and news services play in that process, are central questions posed in the Reuters Institute Digital News Survey, which the Oxford-based Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has been conducted annually since 2012.
The 2020 study was carried out simultaneously in the following countries under the coordination of the Oxford (UK) based Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Singapore, Slovakia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, United Kingdom and the United States. Around 2,000 people were interviewed in each country in 2020. In total, the study is based on 80,155 respondents from 40 countries on six continents in its eighth repetition. The fieldwork in all countries was conducted between mid-January and the end of February 2020 by the YouGov survey institute.
Since 2013, the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut has been the collaborating partner responsible for the German contribution. The findings of each year for Germany are documented in the series “
Working Papers of the HBI” [Arbeitspapiere des Hans-Bredow-Instituts].
The international as well as the German Report 2020 were published on 16 June 2020.
The surveys in Germany were conducted between 17 and 30 January 2020 by the survey institute YouGov prior to the COVID19 pandemic. In a separate study, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism conducted a supplementary survey on specific news usage under COVID-19 conditions. The findings of this survey are presented in several parts of the German report.
