There are significant differences in the level of participation in the news across countries. At a headline level, Brazil, the US, Spain, and Italy are most likely to post comments, share links, and talk about news. The Japanese and Germans are least likely to do so. Americans, for example, are twice as likely to comment on a news story online or ‘like’ a news story, compared with the Germans or the British.

At a fundamental level, we see very different ‘participatory cultures’ around news. 60% of our Japanese sample says they did not participate in any of the 12 ways suggested to them in our survey in the past week, compared with only 8% in Brazil and 15% in Italy.

One interesting change since last year is a decline in online participation in France. The number taking part in online polls about news for example has fallen from 40% to 11%. Last year’s survey coincided with the run-up to the French presidential elections and these data suggest that a political campaign can significantly increase the amount of online participation. It should be noted that Italy was also in a pre-election period during our 2013 survey, which may explain the higher than average figures in a number of categories.

A number of types of online participation are strongly correlated with age. In general, we see higher online participation with younger age groups and amongst men. Specifically, young people are more likely to share a news link, comment on news, or post a picture in a social network, whereas older groups are more likely to use traditional methods like email or commenting via a trusted news site. In general, we see higher online participation with younger age groups and amongst men.

Young prefer sharing and commenting via social networks

Across our countries, around one in five share a news story via email (17%) or a social network (20%) each week. Amongst those who share news, our UK data allow us to drill down into which networks are most important. Facebook, email, and Twitter account for the vast majority of activity, though other networks are popular elsewhere, e.g. Reddit in the US, Orkut in Brazil, and a range of other networks in Japan.

Most important social networks for sharing news (UK)

Looking again at devices, those using smartphones and tablets are participating more heavily in news than the general sample. They do more of everything.

In explaining these differences, we again ran our regression model to see if we could separate the impact of device from other factors like age, gender, education, income and interest in news. In the United States we found a significant relationship with Apple smartphones, where users were 41% more likely to share news than other digital news users. Tablet usage does not seem to have an impact on sharing news when controlling for these other variables and in the UK neither tablets nor smartphones showed a significant relationship.

New model of participation

In the UK we have attempted this year a new classification of how people participate with online news. This was created by coding responses to questions about contributing to the news according to levels of proactivity (e.g. posting a comment, writing a blog) and reactivity (liking a news story, voting, etc.). We then combined this with the frequency with which each activity takes place. Offline activities relate to the question we asked about discussing news with friends or colleagues.

This model draws on research published by the BBC in 2012, which demonstrated that a significant majority of the population is now actively participating online¹ – even if most of the proactive discussion is still confined to a minority. When we applied these techniques to our online news sample, we also found that the majority (63%) is participating in some way each week, with 40% doing so online.

Easy participation – such as liking, sharing and voting – turns out to be the most popular set of activities driven by the increasing availability of these tools on websites and social networks. But we have also identified a group of ‘intense participators’ who drive much of the proactive online engagement, especially around politics and entertainment/celebrity news.

If we drill further into the data, we can see that the 25–34 group is particularly proactive (35% of all intense participators). The intense group is also heavily male.

In contrast, the majority of those who are passive or contribute occasionally offline come from older groups, particularly the over 55s. People who like to talk about news offline tend to be female.

In years to come, we can expect more of the offline participators to come online. It will also be interesting to see if the wide differences between countries persist in terms of adoption of new social and participatory techniques.