This thirst for a visual element to music streaming was evident in some April 2020 data from Nielsen Music as cited by Digital Music News. It found that audio music streaming volumes in the US were down by 6.2% in the week ending March 19 (vs. an eight-week pre-coronavirus baseline) and by 9.2% in the week ending March 26.

Early in 2020, as the pandemic was getting underway, Americans flocked to their TV sets at a rate unseen in years. Initially, US households were glued to the news, as uncertainty over the coronavirus drove viewership. In the following weeks, the TVs mostly stayed on, as the initial wave of lockdowns kept Americans stuck on the couch with lots of new time to kill.

Consumption of broadcast radio and print was also very high among 35- to 44-year-olds. Somewhat surprisingly, the share of internet users who had accessed music, podcasts, or other audio content online shrank slightly between H1 2020 and H1 2021, to 80.0%. Penetration declined in all demographics, though the change was very slight in some cases.

Daily broadcast TV consumption increased compared with the prior year, to average 2 hours, 40 minutes (2:40). Time spent with radio fell marginally, though, to 59 minutes. Print newspapers and magazines maintained a smaller, but still substantial, market presence—read by 46.4% and 49.2% of internet users, respectively.

News. In late August, Facebook announced that it was expanding its Facebook News feature internationally. Facebook News is a separate tab on the core app dedicated to news and was first launched in the US in October 2019. Its purpose is to provide users with a place to find higher-quality news than they may normally see on the News Feed.

A similar percentage of users now turn to Instagram for news as they do Twitter, according to new data from the Reuters Digital News Report.

However, interviews we conducted with publishers fielded pretty consistent reporting of listener patterns—down slightly, but with a bounce back when the reopened economy brought back commuting and other daily habits that lead to greater podcast consumption.

Consumption of podcasts, which GWI measured for the first time in H1 2020, accounted for 1:12 each day in H1 2021.

The news: Bitcoin won’t work as a payments network because it’s inefficient and bad for the environment, Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder and CEO of crypto exchange FTX, told the Financial Times.

However, print magazine consumption had fallen from 67.4% to 66.1%. Readership of print newspapers and magazines increased with age—but penetration was above 54% even among respondents ages 16 to 24. Radio was marginally less popular in Q1 2020 than a year prior, but it did reach 81.1% of internet users.

At a time when reliable information about the coronavirus is critical, trust in the news media in Canada is not as high as it should be, according to new research.