Survey Methodology for the 2016 Digital News Report

This study has been commissioned by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism to understand how news is being consumed in a range of countries. Research was conducted by YouGov using an online questionnaire at the end of January/beginning of February 2016.

• The data were weighted to targets based on census/industry accepted data, such as age, gender, and region to represent the total
• As this survey deals with news consumption, we filtered out anyone who said that they had not consumed any news in the past month, in order to ensure that irrelevant responses didn’t adversely affect data quality. This category averaged 3.5% but was as high as 12% in Canada.
• A comprehensive online questionnaire was designed to capture all aspects of news consumption.
• A number of face-to-face focus groups were held in the US,UK, Germany and Spain to explore issues relating to news consumption and the question of trust.

Our survey was conducted online – and as such the results will under-represent the consumption habits of people who are not online (typically older, less affluent, and with limited formal education). Where relevant, we have tried to make this clear within the text. The main purpose, however, is to track the activities and changes over time within the digital space– as well as gaining understanding about how offline media and online media are used together. A fuller description of the methodology and a discussion of non-probability sampling techniques can be found on our website.

Along with country-based figures, throughout the report we also use aggregate figures based on responses from all respondents across all the countries covered. These figures are meant only to indicate overall tendencies and should be treated with caution.