TELEVISION NEWS is under increasing threat from social media, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center for the People the Press, a US-based opinion research organisation that studies attitudes toward politics, the press and public policy issues.

Its biannual research into how news is consumed found younger people shifting away from television as a source of news information to digital and social media.

It’s a drift newspapers have been battling hard against in recent years but, until now, television news had broadly speaking kept its audience across all demographics.

Pew’s figures show that this is changing in the US. Overall, 55 per cent said they watched the news or a current affairs programme on television the previous day, so it’s still the most popular news source, but its audience is ageing.

Only about a third of those younger than 30 said they watched television news at all; in 2006, nearly half of young people said they watched news on television.

Social media is now becoming an increasingly important source of news in the younger age group, with the percentage of Americans saying they saw news or news headlines on a social networking site doubling – from 9 per cent to 19 per cent – since 2010.

Those that do read newspapers increasingly look to digital delivery, with 55 per cent of regular New York Times readers saying they read the paper mostly on a computer or mobile device, as do 44 per cent of Wall Street Journal readers.