ZoomerMedia has announced it’s acquiring tech news publication MobileSyrup from Blue Ant Media for $950,000. MobileSyrup publishes tech news and reviews, including streaming, gaming, AI, and consumer guides, boasting two million monthly average users. ZoomerMedia’s eighth acquisition in two years, it follows the company’s purchase of Alberta-based digipub Curiocity, and Owen Sound’s CJOS 92.3FM. The company now encompasses 18 media properties including blogTO, Daily Hive, Curiocity, The Peak, LudwigVan, and EverythingZoomer.com, plus ZoomerMedia’s legacy television, radio, and print brands and their websites.
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and the University of Oxford have released the 13th edition of their Digital News Report, based on data from six continents and 47 markets. This year’s report documents the scale and impact of “platform resets” with TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube on the rise, as consumers embrace more video consumption. It also cautions publishers adopting AI to proceed carefully as the report finds the public generally wants humans in the driving seat at all times. The reprot finds news use across online platforms is fragmenting, with six networks now reaching at least 10% of respondents, compared with just two a decade ago. YouTube is used for news by almost a third (31%) of the report’s global sample each week, WhatsApp by around a fifth (21%), while TikTok (13%) has overtaken Twitter (10%), now rebranded X, for the first time. Short news videos are accessed by two-thirds (66%) of the sample each week, with longer formats attracting around half (51%). The main locus of news video consumption is online platforms (72%), rather than publisher websites (22%). Find Canadian market data here.
