Earlier this week, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism released its fourth annual Digital News Report. While many of the key findings come as no surprise, the study does reinforce many major trends such as the impact smartphones have in disrupting consumption patterns, business models and news formats and the increasingly important role of social media sites in finding and distributing news.

Some highlights of the report include:

• The smartphone may be the king of mobile, but news brands are finding it difficult to break through on these devices. Two-thirds of smartphone users now use their device to access news every week, with 70% having a news app installed on their phone. However, only a third of respondents actually use the app. In fact, many readers still prefer to use their browser over dedicated news apps.
• Social media are starting to be more important source of news than print in some countries, including Spain, Ireland, Italy and France. In fact, the last twelve months saw the growth of Facebook news shares increase by 42 percent. That said, social media also ranked the lowest in terms of accuracy and reliability, with many users viewing it not as a destination for news but more of a way of gaining access to it.
• The value of the homepage is shifting as consumers increasingly use social, search or push notifications to discover news. However, these trends differ by country (in the UK, Denmark and Finland most readers still go directly to the website, whereas in Italy, Spain, Japan and Brazil most use search) and by age (e-mail is used more by older groups as opposed to social media, which is used more by younger groups). The starting point of finding news is less likely to be a brand homepage, as more consumers move to search engines, social networks, or email. This trend helps explain the success of Buzzfeed, which puts very little emphasis on the homepage and instead has focused on developing a sophisticated social media strategy.
• People still don’t want to pay for online news. In the UK, 75% of respondents said they would never pay for online news, compared to 59% in Spain and 68% in the US. In fact, the research showed no trend towards an increase in paid online content, with less than 11% of news readers paying for online news in the last year. Essentially, the study showed that if a person is not already paying for news it is very unlikely that they would be prepared to pay in the future.
• Online advertising is annoying. While media companies are trying to develop new business models, audiences are becoming increasingly aware of their tactics – and they don’t like it. In the UK, 33% of readers said they felt disappointed or deceived when reading an article and realizing it was sponsored content. Additionally, 39% of respondents in the UK said they are using adblocking software.
• Online news video is growing in tandem with the move of social network sites to make video easier to display and play, coupled with the fact that publishers have increased their video news offerings. This is part of a larger trend to adopt new visual online formats that are more suitable for mobile screens.
• The threat of the online “filter bubble” was overblown. Most social media users (76%) and search users (73%) said that the use of social media or search as gateways to news caused them to be access different sources, leading them to brands they normally would not have looked at.
• Age matters. According to the study, there are marked differences between generations in the way news is found, consumed and shared. For people over 45, online news is seen more as a supplement to traditional sources (print, radio and TV) and they haven’t abandoned their trusted brands. However, younger “digital natives” are exhibiting very different behaviors, with the expectation that news will come to them through online channels and formats.