Why social media are reshaping the world of news

If readers want to investigate further, they can follow links conveniently provided, or watch attached video streams. The media stream becomes a menu of news and the prioritising of stories is controlled by the consumer, not the news producer or broadcaster.

Social media platforms also offer a unique breadth of information. At a quick glance, users get a sense of what all of the major news sources are saying about a particular issue. That's not possible with any other currently available medium – not in such a quickly processable format.

A revealing though perhaps predictable finding of the Reuters report is the rise in popularity of sites offering quirky or comedic takes on the daily news.

This owes a lot to news overload and the information explosion. In most developed nations, 24/7 news channels dominate satellite and free-view TV schedules.

Even if you choose not to watch much news on TV, it's easy to feel surrounded by serious news, most of which, predictably, is bad news.

As an audience, we reach a saturation point, after which we start looking for light relief. We still want something to pique our curiosity and to get us thinking; but we'd rather not add to the sense of impending doom that sometimes seeps through wall-to-wall TV news.

Besides, serious TV news channels often present only cookie-cutter newsreaders and reporters. They allow little room for individuality or flair, both of which are a core part of the culture of social media.

Flick from one news channel to another at any given time of day and you'll likely find reporters talking about the same things in much the same way – even if in different languages. Often, they're even standing in front of the same buildings.

Stylistically, some reporters make you wish they'd never attended journalism school, where their speech inflections were ingeniously re-engineered and they learned to fill time by saying very little – or repeating the blindingly obvious. Social media provide a space for the more off-beat news hounds or commentators.

Quirky news, or news lite, also represents a response to the age of the so-called Exaflood – the exponential growth in data generated worldwide. Every day, an estimated 2.5 quintillian (10¹⁸) bytes of digital information are added to the global information database, mostly via the internet. This is an unimaginably large amount of data.

To bring that down to the personal level, one US study has suggested that the average American will consume 34 GB of information, in one form or another, every day. That's enough to give an aspirin a headache.

The Reuters study also reveals that social media are turning certain journalists into brands, or news celebrities.