Key insights into today's digital news consumption from latest RISJ report

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The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) published its annual Digital News Report today (June 15), looking at trends in digital news consumptions across platforms and devices and analysing data from 50,000 people surveyed across 26 countries.

At the launch event hosted in London this morning, David Pemsel, chief executive officer of the Guardian Media Group; John McAndrew, director of content at Sky News; Katie-Vanneck-Smith, chief customer officer and global managing director for Dow Jones International; and Stephen Hull, editor-in-chief of Huffington Post UK, discussed the report's main findings.

Here is a snapshot of the results and the conversation from Twitter. You can catch up on the discussion using #DNP2016 or watch it on Periscope:

• Twenty-eight per cent of 18-24 year-olds surveyed said social media is their main source of news, surpassing television for the first time, which stood at 24 per cent.
• Facebook leads the way in the top most used social platforms for news, with 44 per cent, followed by YouTube (19 per cent), Twitter (10 per cent) and WhatsApp (8 per cent).

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• Seventy-eight per cent of people said in the study they still "mostly rely on text" as opposed to video for news, citing speed and convenience as a main reason (41 per cent), followed by the presence of pre-roll ads (35 per cent).
• People tend to use traditional news outlets as primary sources, and digital-only outlets as additional sources or 'guilty pleasures'. In the UK, 70 per cent of those surveyed said their got their news mainly from BBC News, while only 13 per cent of respondents cited The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed as their main sources.

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• News is increasingly found through aggregators and social networks, which means news brands get noticed "less than half the time in the UK and Canada", the study highlighted, and only "a quarter of a time" in Japan and South Korea.

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• Survey respondents were interested the concept of personalised stories, but expressed some concern around algorithm-curated news, that might result in missing out on key information or different viewpoints.
• Thirty-six per cent said they would be happy for their news to be selected automatically based on their previous consumption habits, 30 per cent were happy to rely on editorial judgement and only 22 per cent said they would rely on articles served automatically based on social recommendations.

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