People trust news they get from online sources as much or more than information gathered from friends or watching television, but they see blogs as the least trustworthy way of getting information.
That’s according to a new study from market information company TNS called Digital World, Digital Life which examined online behavior and perspectives of more than 27,000 people in 16 countries.
In a survey, participants were asked to rank the trustworthiness of 13 sources of information – from friend’s recommendations to Wikipedia – on a 1 to 10 scale.
Americans said they trust online news more than information from TV, with 38 percent trusting online compared to 33 percent for TV. Online news even beat out newspapers, which was seen as trustworthy by 34 percent of U.S. respondents.
But blogs were almost universally panned in the survey with only about 10 percent of people around the globe trusting information from them. Only 9 percent of Americans find blogs to be trustworthy, less than one quarter of the people who trust online news.
"Online blogs clearly have no real accountability," said Don Ryan, VP Technology and Media, TNS. "Although they may be a great source of entertainment and a useful source of information and reviews they are clearly highly subjective."
A Pew Research Center study this year found that 37 percent of Americans search for news online at least three times a week – more than the amount who listen to radio news or read newspapers on a daily basis.
