Interest in news in the Netherlands has declined slightly. The group of people who are not very or not at all interested in news is increasing, especially among young people, the Media Authority reports. At the beginning of this year, before the start of the war in Ukraine, the commissariat, together with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, asked about 2000 people about their use of news for the Digital News Report Netherlands 2022.
After two years with a lot of news about the corona pandemic, interest in and use of news has declined; especially among young people. 82 percent of Dutch people still check the news at least daily.
According to the research, the group of Dutch people who actively avoid the news is small, but the group has increased in recent years. Especially young people up to the age of 35 actively avoid the news. Among young people up to the age of 25, the proportion who are not very or not at all interested in the news has risen from 11 to 20 percent.
56 percent of Dutch people trust most of the news. Trust in the news changes every year. Confidence rose during the corona pandemic and fell again in early 2022, especially in the youngest age group between 18 and 25 years. Compared to other countries, the Netherlands still has strong confidence in the majority of news.
Although social media is increasingly chosen as the main source of news, the total use of social media for news is not increasing. More than half of the Dutch take news via social media. Facebook in particular is used for news. Especially among young people, Instagram is becoming more popular for the use of news. Of the 18-24 year olds, 35 percent are kept informed by Instagram.
The supervisory board notes the trend that direct access to a news app or site is declining and news is more often consumed via indirect access, such as news-gathering sites, notifications and search engines. This change is particularly visible among young people. Access to news is therefore increasingly determined by personalized notifications or by the intervention of a recommendation system.