When facts are fuzzy, who are you going to call – Joe Rogan?

Globe and Mail

05-07-2025

If you're reading this column online, you're among the majority of Canadians – 73 per cent – who get their news digitally, according to the 2025 Digital News Report published last month by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. What may surprise you is that these digital sources include not only websites and apps, but also podcasts, social media, video-sharing networks such as YouTube, and even AI chatbots.
The report, now in its 14th year of tracking news media trends, offers more granular data on the habits of American audiences. More than half of those surveyed – 54 per cent – said they had looked to social and video networks as a source of news in the past week. And that same proportion of young adults said social and video networks are their main source of news.
(The picture is somewhat different in this country, given that Meta has banned news links on its Canadian platforms since 2023. Forty-four per cent of respondents said they use social media as a source of news, down two percentage points since last year and down 11 percentage points since 2022, during the COVID-19 pandemic.)
Authors of the report were also struck by the attention Americans are paying to unconventional news sources – led, in some cases, by non-journalists, such as Joe Rogan, the podcaster who started as a stand-up comic, then worked as a sitcom actor and TV host. (Remember Fear Factor, the reality show that challenged contestants to wild stunts such as walking onto the wing of an airplane in flight?) Slightly more than one-fifth of respondents (22 per cent) said they saw Mr. Rogan commenting on or discussing the news in the previous week, while 10 per cent said the same of comedian John Oliver, who hosts the satirical current events show Last Week Tonight.
For the first time in the report's history, researchers asked whether respondents use chatbots, such as ChatGPT, to get their news. At 7 per cent, the proportion that answered yes is 'probably higher than I expected,' Nic Newman, lead author of the report and a senior research associate at Oxford University, told me on a video call. And, he continued, 'twice as many young people say they're using chatbots to access news in different ways.' That uptake is remarkable given that AI's ability to offer real-time news is relatively new.
So, what does this mean for news organizations? What does it mean for the public?
Regarding the use of chatbots, Mr. Newman said, 'we can expect that to grow significantly in the next year or so, and that will be hugely disruptive to the news industry.' Already, audiences are losing the habit of visiting news websites or apps directly as their main source of news (topping out at 27 per cent of American respondents age 45 to 54, and reaching a low of 16 per cent of those age 25 to 34).
But there are opportunities for legacy news organizations to highlight their strengths. Reuters Institute research has found that audiences 'want institutional media to do their job when they need it to be there,' Mr. Newman said. For example, when international survey respondents were asked where they would fact-check 'something important in the news online that they suspected might be false,' 38 per cent selected 'a news source I trust.' That's a larger proportion than the 35 per cent who selected 'official source (e.g. government website)' and significantly larger than the 14 per cent who selected 'social media or video network' – the domain of Mr. Rogan et al.
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However, news organizations have come to understand that they need to do more than report news and human interest stories with journalistic rigour, Mr. Newman said. 'It's no longer enough just to produce something, because distribution is now important. If you can't produce something that somebody wants to read, then it won't find its way through the distribution algorithms or chains, and you'll never find an audience.'
Rather than copy the influencers and content creators who offer news on social and video networks, he said, news organizations can adapt some of the storytelling techniques that audiences like and engage with, such as vertical video. They can have a presence on other platforms where non-conventional news sources are thriving, such as TikTok, to build their audiences and a sense of community.
'I think that journalism should be absolutely at the forefront of telling people what's new and uncovering things, and they need to work harder at making sure that people read it,' Mr. Newman said.