Abstract: In the era of social media, users have gradually formed the habit of reading news from social media, but sometimes news reading habits may change due to the influence of special circumstances. Through quantitative empirical research, this paper compares the news acquisition habits of users in many places before and after the Covid-19 epidemic, and discusses the changes of users' news acquisition habits during the epidemic. The empirical study found that under the influence of the epidemic, users' news acquisition habits changed, mainly reflected in the decrease of the proportion of news from social media, especially from WeChat news habits changed greatly. At the same time, the proportion of people getting their news from traditional mainstream media has been marginalized. The epidemic will have a short-term impact on users' news acquisition habits, but in the long term, users will still rely on social media to get news.

Published in Journalism and Writing, 12, 2020

Author: Kuang, Wenbo is a professor at the School of Journalism, Renmin University of China, and a researcher at the Research Center for Journalism and Social Development, Renmin University of China.