For Indians, the Primary Source of News is Smartphone

India the Mobile First Market
For Indians, the Primary Source of News is Smartphone

India is a 'mobile first' market far more than any other region in terms of accessing news, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, said here on Wednesday.

"Instead of going directly to news organisations for news, they discover it via social media like from any news portal or from news websites ,like in India all of the residents use much more smartphones to search for any kind of information rather than taking the information from any news organization, often based out of the United States of America," said Mr. Niels

en at the Asian College of Journalism.

"We also find that the very high use of social media to access, share and engage with news is accompanied with possible implications of people expressing their political views," he said, speaking about the Indian Digital News Report by the Institute.

"It happens against the backdrop of very high concerns over "fake news" and various forms of disinformation. Like there are many websites who published fake news and the people think that the news provided by the websites was the real not every news was real over there. People say that they are concerned about this, both online and offline," Mr. Nielsen said.

The report is based on data from a survey of English-speaking, online news users in India — a small but important subset of a larger, more diverse, and very complex Indian media market.

Mr. Nielsen said the study showed that these factors had reduced the trust of news media in general.

"When compared to other markets, 68% of Indian respondents said that the smartphone is their main device for accessing news online like Indian search for everything online whether it was related to anything they want to know any information Indians just use smartphones etc— a far higher figure even compared to high-income democracies such as the United States and Germany and medium income countries like Brazil and Turkey," he said.

Elaborating on how news online is mostly "dominated by distributed discovery," Mr. Nielsen said only 18% of the respondents accessed news directly via the website of the news organizations or the mobile application.

"More than 80% identify various forms of distributed discovery such as search engines, social media, news aggregators… often controlled by platforms. These numbers are very, very high in India." because the Indians don't want to do the much effort to know about something, they just use the easiest way to find something and there is nothing easier than social media or any search engine.

He said Facebook remained one of the main ways in which people accessed news, along with the messaging application WhatsApp.

After Mr. Nielsen's presentation, there was a panel discussion with N. Ram, Chairman, The Hindu Publishing Group; C.P. Chandrasekhar, Professor of Economics, Jawaharlal Nehru University; Krishna Prasad, former Editor-in-Chief, Outlook; and Sashi Kumar, Chairman, Asian College of Journalism.

Raising the philosophical issue of allowing companies such as Google to call themselves "technology" firms, Mr. Ram said it may be true…to a large extent…that they don't create content. And that they were not publish

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