The Times of Malta continues to be the country’s favourite and most trusted news organisation by a wide margin, an independent study has shown.

The Media Insights study found that nearly 78 per cent of Sunday newspaper readers said they regularly read The Sunday Times of Malta, followed by just over 16 per cent who read It-Torċa and just above 12 per cent who mentioned The Malta Independent on Sunday.

The Times of Malta website is also the online news source most people refer to, with 77 per cent of those surveyed citing it. Just under half of all respondents – 48.5 per cent – said the Times of Malta website is their favourite online source of news, with 10.7 per cent citing TVM’s website and 9.4 per cent naming Lovin Malta as their favourite online source. 10.8 per cent of respondents said they had no favourite news site.

Times of Malta’s website is even more popular among university graduates, with 58.2 per cent of respondents with a tertiary education citing it as their favourite online source of news.

The study, carried out by research firm Esprimi, was based on two national surveys done over a period of a week in April and October 2018, online and by telephone, with a total of more than 4,250 responses.

The Times and Sunday Times also led the pack for preferred printed newspapers, with nearly two-thirds of all respondents, ahead of It-Torċa and L-Orizzont with 7.2 per cent and 5.1 per cent respectively. Around one in 10 indicated “none”.

More than four in every five respondents cited the Times of Malta website as one of their online news sources.

Sunday remains by far the most popular day for newspapers with around a third of respondents, but nearly double that – 62.6 per cent – answered “never” when asked when they were most likely to read printed newspapers. Unsurprisingly, the study found that far more people are now consuming their news online, with 41.6 per cent saying they read news websites and 7.5 per cent opting for newspapers or reading both printed and online news.

Far more people are now consuming their news online

More than half said they did not read news articles either online or in print.

Meanwhile, among magazine readers, Sunday Circle and Pink, published by Allied Newspapers Limited and distributed in The Sunday Times, emerged as the most popular and third most popular respectively.

More than half of respondents who bought magazines from the store or got them with their paper said they like to refer to the Sunday Circle, while it was 27.6 per cent for the women’s magazine Pink.

The Sunday Times of Malta is the country's most popular Sunday newspaper.