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'I Saw the News on Facebook': Brand Attribution when Accessing News from Distributed Environments

DOI: 10.60625/risj-207c-k891

The growth of social media and other aggregators over the last few years has changed the nature of online consumption.

Our question is: Do people remember the news brand when they visit a story via social media or search engines? In order to answer this question we used a YouGov panel to automatically track website usage by a representative sample of UK internet users and then serve a survey to see if they could remember the brand.

We find that less than half could remember the name of the news brand for a particular story when coming from search engines or social media. Users were more likely to remember the brand via social media and search engines when they read a story from their main source of news. Young people were also more likely to correctly attribute a news brand when coming from social media compared with older respondents.

Published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism with the support of the Google and the Digital News Initiative.

 

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