TOP FIVE SOURCES OF NEWS AND INFORMATION

 Apple News has steadily grown as a news aggregation platform on apple productions. Apple news had 125 million active users in the second quarter of 2020. Apple news has gained popularity due to the fact that it can be accessed across all of your apple products. This can be helpful for people who want to be able to view the same information regardless of what device they are on.

Apple news is designed so that Apple News editors select the most important and compelling news articles and display them as headlines and top stories for viewers to read. Apple news has expanded its services to provide the option to subscribe to Apple News +. This News subscription service offers hundreds of magazines and leading newspaper articles. Apple News+ has created a system where every magazine or article you read has its own topic page where you can find additional articles generated by the same author. This feature allows readers who enjoy an author to see more work published by them quickly. Being able to get the latest version of a magazine or article is an invaluable resource when trying to get the most up-to-date information. This changes how we view media; instead of waiting for an article or magazine to be delivered to your house, you're now able to view it as soon as it is published.

As more and more teenagers and young adults use social media in their everyday life, they have started integrating their news outlets into their social media platforms. An example of this is the recent spike of news on social media: Instagram. In the past, Instagram has been a platform for sharing photos and videos as well as lifestyle content rather than a news platform. As more millennials and Gen Z users use the platform, demand for news has become apparent. 

Recently published data about how people accessed news about the covid 19 pandemic found that, in the US, a quarter of the respondents between the ages of 18-24 access news content on Instagram on a weekly basis. In comparison, only 17% of these adolescents used newspapers to access news information. We can see that Instagram has become a new way for people to access media, but Jennifer Grygil, who teaches communications at Syracuse University, stated, "so people share means that are more about influencing then informing and people need to exercise caution and be aware of who they're engaging with." This aspect of social media has made it hard to find accurate news information on Instagram because anyone on the platform can call themselves a reporter. This further complicates finding legitimate news on social media because you have to sift through the fake news and do all the fact-checking yourself. This is why the news that has been found on social media should be fact-checked to ensure the information is accurate and hasn't been altered

 TikTok was initially created as a platform for users to post short videos; most of these videos are funny and didn’t have much importance or fact to them. As the platform slowly grew, more and more people started to post more informative videos about current events leading to a demand for news on the platform. According to The Associated Press, new research found that nearly 20% of TikTok search results were about news topics. We can see a growing need for news outlets on TikTok, but users need to be careful about the information they are consuming. TikTok has created a space where anyone and everyone can become a news reporter on the platform, creating lots of fake news, and details are lost in translation.

TikTok issued a statement in response to the fake news allegations, and in the report, they mentioned that its community guidelines forbid “harmful misinformation” they also stated, “we do not allow harmful misinformation, including medical misinformation, and we will remove it from the platform. We partner with credible voices to elevate authoritative content on topics related to public health and partner with independent fact-checkers who help us to assess the accuracy of content.”

This quote shows that TikTok doesn’t support the fake news being posted, but at the end of the day, they don’t have much control. It is challenging for TikTok to remove a news post because the research needed to prove that it was altered or fake is just too much work. 

The solution to this problem is taking every news post or article you view on TikTok with a grain of salt and fact-checking everything. TikTok will continue to be one of the leading news sources for this generation, and it is up to the viewer to be able to sift through the fake news and fact-check any news they think is true. 

As many Americans search for a reliable news source, many adolescents and young adults have turned to Youtube as one of their preferred news outlets. Youtube is a video-sharing platform that has recently gained a large audience, potentially due to the fact that independent news producers are more likely to cover negative subjects that traditional news outlets can't post. Even though many other news platforms provide up-to-date information, that information is heavily controlled, and people find it harder and harder to find articles on subjects that the U.S. has defined as harmful such as conspiracy theories. 

YouTube has become an essential source of news for many Americans and a quarter of U.S. adults (26%) say they get their news on Youtube. 

With this, many Americans getting news on YouTube question why there is a sudden rise in the number of people using the platform as a news outlet. A Pew Research Center study was conducted to identify why people are flocking to YouTube as a news source. For this study, researchers used computational methods and trained human coders to identify the most popular news channels on Youtube. The study found that one of the main reasons behind the surge of news on YouTube is that the platform has a mix of established news outlets and independent news creators. This creates a unique platform because mainstream news outlets no longer entirely control what Americans watch. In the past, news has been given to the general public in small doses, and the stories that outlets posts are heavily censored. Youtube creates a platform where users can find news videos from conventional news outlets such as NBC, CBS, and Fox News. The platform also allows users to view the same news content through videos posted by small channels. 

NBC has created an app that allows users to view headline news articles for free. This application provides on-demand content from NBC Universal's networks, including NBC, Bravo, H!, Oxygen, MSNBC, and USA. The NBC app also allows users to view live feed news from NBC and its cable network if you sign in through your TV provider. While this application claims to provide updated information, articles and new 

episodes usually are posted to the app the next day. 

This is a huge downside for users that want to see the most updated news. Not being able to see the news articles as soon as they are posted will force users to a different news platform. 

Another downside to the NBC news app is the new credit-based system where users have to pay for more credits to watch their favorite episodes and news stories. The app offers users a one-time 

grant of three credits to view on-demand content without a tv subscription. This is a massive downside because the majority of people dont want to pay for news. The fact that NBC expects users to pay for new is the number one reason people are finding a new platform. Nowadays, there are so many free recourses for viewing up-to-date news that there is no reason to pay for it. Another downside to the NBC app is the obsessive use of ads on the platform. With NBC being a paid news outlet, it seems excessive that the platform also forces users to watch ads. This is yet another factor that goes into the decision-making for what news platform you want to use.