Online news readers access the source of the news directly from the websites or apps of the publication and from social networks in almost equal percentages with a slight predominance of the latter. As demonstrated by a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in collaboration with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation on over two thousand US adults, 26% of news readers on the web access them via social networks, 23% directly from sites or apps and only 8% from search engines.
7% access online news through newsletters. But there is also a 1% who read the news thanks to recommendations from friends and family via email or Whatsapp. This means that 65% of online readers prefer to access news through a single path, while 35% say they prefer no path over the others.
56% of the sample declares that they remember the source of the news they have just read by clicking on a link; this happens especially when the news comes directly from the site that published it, less frequently when the link has been reported by a friend via email or message.
Finally, the study observes that, reading the news is followed by further sharing on social networks, via email or message or a comment: in 73% of cases when the link comes from friends or family, in 62% of cases when comes from a search engine, in 53% when it comes from social media.
