How do you get your news and who's your favourite presenter?

Hold the front page – Saga’s male customers are officially news junkies. Seven out of ten (71%) seek out the headlines multiple times a day, and a quarter (26%) are spending one to three hours each day watching or reading the news.

Women customers follow the news, too, just less avidly, with 58% catching up multiple times a day. Those who don’t are more likely than men to say it’s because they find it too negative.

And the older you are – both men and women – the more into the news you are, with men aged 80 the keenest of all. This is a well-recognised phenomenon, according to Nic Newman at the Reuters Institute. "Partly you grow into it, and partly it’s about habits that developed when you were younger.

"That relationship between journalism and democracy and the importance of keeping in touch with what’s happening were part of people’s formative experience growing up after the war."

What we want to know about

Saga customers are clearly well-informed.

• International affairs are the biggest draw, with 78% interested.
• National politics is next with 75%.
• Local news (74%).
• Finance (67%).
• Environment (46%)
• Entertainment and celebrity hold the least interest (14%).

Our favourite news sources

TV remains the most popular way to get your news fix, with 79% regularly watching bulletins. Radio news attracted just under half (47%).

Older customers are more likely to buy a newspaper every day than younger ones – 46% of those in their 80s get their news in print versus 14% of those in their 50s.

Half (53%) of all ages said they used to buy a paper but no longer do; 52% look at newspapers’ websites or apps. 43% consume more news than 10 years ago.

BBC is the most trusted source at 3.5/5

TV news

When it comes to TV news we definitely have our favourites.

• BBC News at Six is the clear winner, with 39% naming it as their favourite.
• BBC Breakfast came next with 20%.
• ITV Evening News scored 11%.

There’s a clear preference for breakfast and early evening shows over later bulletins. 

A generational divide

Quite how long these big news programmes and their stars will last in the future is a moot point. Younger generations simply don’t watch TV news. Three-quarters of 16-24-year-olds mainly get their news from social media, according to Ofcom’s recent News Consumption report.

They don’t have allegiance to the news brands we hold dear and aren’t even likely to know the source of the snippets they pick up.

In contrast, only 16% of Saga customers use social media for news. They don’t trust it. 

‘There is a big generational divide here,’ says Ed Leighton, director of strategy and research at Ofcom.

"Yet trust is really quite consistent across the ages: all audiences trust TV, radio and print media very highly and are much more sceptical of news they see on social media."

It means the BBC and ITV need to work harder to reach people on social media, he says, and the government may even need to pass laws to make trusted, accurate news more prominent in the algorithms that determine what we see. 

The future of news

Where will we be in 20 years’ time? Newman predicts there will be fewer TV bulletins (eventually broadcast TV will be turned off in favour of streaming).

Instead we may be asking AI to give us a personalised video summary of the latest news or local weather using our favourite presenter. 

Quite how that might be funded, or whether AI Clive Myrie is as trustworthy as BBC Clive Myrie (and how we will tell the difference) remains to be seen.