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Welcome to the Future of Journalism, a podcast from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

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I'm Eduardo Schweddy. 2021 has been an important year for journalism.

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The pandemic has accelerated the shift to hybrid work. News companies have grappled with familiar challenges, such as debunking false information,

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combating climate change and tackling the lack of diversity,

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and also more newsrooms have embraced through the revenue to fight declines in advertising and in print sales.

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So how has this year changed journalism around the world?

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My guests today are four of my colleagues, our director, Rasmus Nielsen, our deputy director, Mira Scelta,

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the leader of our research team, Richard Fletcher and our head of leadership development, Federica Catalini.

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All of them have published research that can help us understand what's happened

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in journalism in 2021 and how some of these challenges can play out in 2022.

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Rasmus Mirra Richard Federico, welcome and thank you for being with us today.

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Thank you. Thanks, Eduardo. Thanks for having us.

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So let's start with you for the recap 2021 Hasbro, the first discussions in the issues around flexibility,

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and it has also accelerated the shift to remote work and hybrid work.

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So you are the lead author of a recent report about these topics.

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How have news of organisations dealt with the inevitable trade offs throughout this year?

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Is there any interesting examples out there thanks to the order?

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Yes. As you mentioned in the Changing NEWSROOM report we published in November,

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we've look at the shift from enforced remote to hybrid and flexible working in

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those places around the world where it was possible to do so in a safe way,

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of course.

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And it turns out that many of the leaders surveyed in the survey say that there are many organisations are still really figuring out how to do this.

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These hybrid shift and really rethinking what is the office for amongst some of the trade off and things to consider and how when you navigate,

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this is a sort of like balance between flexibility,

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equity and operational requirement that this shift requires so concretely who and when is in the office.

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What roles might be more suited to be in the office? And who decides when and how to be in the office?

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And throughout that, of course, they need to navigate the complexity of the gains that we've seen in efficiency, for example.

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But the things I collaboration and communication has been made much harder,

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according to our survey respondent, and things like how to run inclusive hybrid meeting.

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What about proximity bias?

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The fact that the people who might be in the newsroom in front of their bosses might have some sort of like favourite treat men,

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even if not a conscious one, by just being by the virtue of being there and being person.

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Also making sure that hybrid working does not reinforce disparities.

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Think of people with childcare responsibilities, for example, caring responsibilities in general,

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thinking about the added pressure on managers and how the ones left with navigating all of this complexity.

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So many level of complexity that will require careful and very intentional planning from newsroom leaders.

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Hmm. And of course, it's not just about the remote hybrid work at twenty twenty one has been a year of reckoning again for

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the news industry in terms of addressing its lack of diversity in terms of output leadership staff.

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And yet our survey of leaders suggests that many newsrooms are doing actually nothing to tackle these issues.

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For any hour of our listeners working on one of these companies,

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could you give us any examples of news organisations actually taking useful steps to tackle these?

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They virtually the problem, of course. As you said, what it's clear that is is still a lot to be done on diversity front.

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Some of the things that our respondents in the survey mentioned is, for example,

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tracking data on diversity of staff, tracking data on diversity of leadership position,

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for example, having someone in charge of diversity and inclusive practise, but, you know, having a budget to bid behind those things.

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I think the example that are interesting from from this area is both in terms of like increasing the pipeline.

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For example, we have a few respondents who mentioned initiative to try to attract people from less advantaged background and, for example,

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hosting events for students or young readers from those less advantaged backgrounds to show how the

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news industry works and make it look like more appealing and more representative for them as well.

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But of course, thinking about all the levels of the organisation.

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Companies like Quartz, for example, have turned into a fully remote and work from everywhere company.

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And they said in our report that that helped significantly with increasing, for example,

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diversity of the candidates that could apply for jobs and really help them increase the performance in terms of diversity.

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So really thinking about both getting diverse, diverse people with diverse backgrounds with, you know, in the door, in the first place.

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But once they are in the company really thinking about how can we have truly inclusive newsrooms and news organisations?

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Hmm. Let's go from diversity to another issue that new south.

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Far as tracking with and that is climate change Mira, in early October, we launched the Oxford Climate Journalism Network,

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a project whose goal is to help newsrooms improve their coverage of global warming around the world.

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You are one of the co-founders of the project and you are actually leading the project itself.

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So how are we going to achieve this goal? Hi, Eduardo.

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Yep, so the Oxford Climate Journalism Network is going to create a network of journalists from around the world,

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from key newsrooms and from key reporting outlets. And the network is designed to give them the skills,

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the space to discuss and to learn from experts that will put in front of them through a series of online courses.

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And also, crucially, from each other.

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And the idea is to create a kind of global knowledge sharing network where the knowledge sharing goes in all directions.

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And we're also going to work with senior editors and key newsroom managers to figure out how to build newsrooms

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in order to do the kind of new kind of journalism that we need to report the climate story effectively.

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Hmm. Because I guess I mean, the question there is,

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what would you say are the main challenges facing journalism when improving their coverage of this very, very important topic?

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Is it the nature of the topic itself?

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Is it the structure of the newsrooms or is it also the lack of literacy of reporters and editors around this issue?

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It's a combination of factors. The key thing is that the climate story is both increased incredibly immediate.

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It's happening outside your window right now, and it's also very, very long.

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It it's something that really unfold over decades. And the news agenda and newsroom beats are in many ways not quite geared up to report on this,

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to report on something with tremendous intensity and to get the attribution correct, for example,

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to report on the uncertainty, but also to stay on the topic,

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both in terms of science and holding policymakers to account for policies that they're not going to possibly live to see the full implications of.

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So this is kind of part of the problem. And the other issue is several newsrooms are now setting up climate desks and climate hubs,

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and this is really vital and we want to work with them to kind of make sure that everyone has the right skills and knowledge,

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but also to really understand that climate reporting is not a separate beat that can be hived off into a corner,

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that it's something that affects politics and sport and travel and economics and social events as well.

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That is so important. You're also the director of our journalism fellowship programme,

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and you select and host those hands of very talented journalists every year and listen to their conversations here in Oxford.

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As a former Chinese fellow myself and curious, I'm really delighted to ask, what did you learn from them throughout these very, very difficult years?

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Absolutely. And we learnt so much. The key thing is that connexions matter.

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So we've had an in-person fellowship and people have really made an effort to come to Oxford,

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where masks get vaccinated and be in the room together, and they have gained a huge amount.

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We've had journalists from Kashmir, from Hong Kong working with journalists, from London and from the United States,

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and they have all come from in different ways, very difficult environments,

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and they've gained a lot of solidarity and lot of strength in being together.

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What we've also learnt from journalists is how much courage it requires to be a journalist.

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And when you keep your head down, stay out of trouble and when you go into battle to get the story out.

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And it's a balance that sadly that too many journalists are having to deal with pretty much every day.

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Thank you, Richard. One of the chapters of the year of this year.

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Digital news report explains how different groups perceive how the news media covers them,

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and some of this has to do with politics or polarisation or diversity.

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As we discussed before with Fredricka, which groups feel unfairly treated by the news media and what can you tell us about their grievances?

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Yes, as you mentioned, this is one of the areas that we explore for the first time in digital news report this year.

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So just as a reminder, this is a survey of news.

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Audiences across around 40 different media markets and what we were looking at was whether people think that people like them

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are covered fairly or unfairly by the news media and because we wanted to go beyond people's general view of media coverage.

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We asked more specific questions. So we asked, for example, whether people think the news media covers, covers people their age, fairly people,

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their gender, fairly people with their political views, fairly where they're from, fairly and so on and so on.

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And when it comes to age, we find that in most countries,

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people who are aged around 50 are the most likely to think that people their age are covered fairly by the news media.

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But when we look either side of this, they're looking at the older age groups in the younger age groups.

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We see the figures start to fall and in particular, the youngest age group in our data,

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the 18 to 20 year are, in some countries, the least likely to think they are covered fairly.

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And in a country like the UK, just as one example,

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the 18 to 24 is a twice as likely to say that COVID unfairly versus fairly so a big difference within that group.

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In some countries, women are less likely to think they're covered fairly by the news media are the men.

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And this is particularly true for younger women, who again in some countries are more likely to say that COVID unfairly versus fairly.

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And we also saw some interesting differences in how fair people think the coverage is of where they live,

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and the patterns vary according to which country you look at. But I can give you a sense of it.

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So in the UK, people who are further away from London are less likely to think where they live as covered fairly, for example.

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And you can see a similar pattern in the US too. So as we if we start at the east and west coasts and then look further inland,

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people are more likely to say that they're covered unfairly in that case.

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And there's also we see a similar pattern again in in Germany,

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where people in the former eastern states are less likely to say that the media covers where they live fairly.

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And lastly, the other really important factor for these kind of judgements is politics.

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So political partisans on both the left and the right are typically more likely to say that they're

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covered unfairly compared to people who put themselves in the centre of the political spectrum.

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Of course, it's important to keep in mind that these are people's perceptions,

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so we may can't necessarily use the data to to to to to to learn what we think about the coverage itself.

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And because because it may or may not be a result of the coverage, it could also just be people's perceptions.

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And this is particularly relevant when we think about something like political partisanship,

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because research on the so-called hostile media phenomenon,

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this showing that partisans from different sides can sometimes think that the same coverage is biased against them.

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But nonetheless, perceptions are still very important, especially as we we think about something like trust, for example.

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Hmm. Totally.

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And talking about politics, I would like to raise one of the articles that you have published this year along with some of our colleagues,

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and that's a piece that suggests that people that use search and social and aggregators have actually more they versus news diets,

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contrary to what many listeners may expect and contrary to some of the talk about filter bubbles,

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an echo chamber, etc. So how did you reach this conclusion and what do you make of it?

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Well, this finding is based on some desktop and laptop web tracking data collected by YouGov in the in the UK in 2017.

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And as you mentioned, in line with other research, we found that rather than enclosing users into filter bubbles where algorithmic news

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recommended supposedly filtering out information that people don't want to see or don't like.

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We found that social media search engines,

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aggregators and other similar services are actually more likely to show people news from outlets they wouldn't normally use.

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Ultimately,

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leaving them with more diverse news diets and also news diets that are more balanced across different outlets with different editorial lines.

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And we think this happens in part because if people are left to their own devices when it comes to getting news online,

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most people don't have particularly diverse news repertoires.

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So many people hardly use any online news at all, even if they're using lots of news offline, but also outside of platforms.

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People form strong habits where they voluntarily choose to go back to the same websites over and over again.

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But it's also in part because when people are using social media search engines and aggregators,

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they really have less direct control over what outlets they come into contact with.

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So if someone goes to a search engine, for example, and puts in a news query that often in practise,

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end up clicking on an article from an outlet they wouldn't normally go to process,

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which we've called elsewhere automated serendipity and on social media.

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Similar things can happen. But in addition, many because many people don't log on to social media with the specific intention to look for news.

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They can also be incidentally exposed to news while they're looking to connect with friends and to themselves, or just pass the time.

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And of course, this is something that's particularly important for diversity amongst people who don't otherwise consume very much news online.

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That being said, I think it's also important to stress a couple of points.

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So first, although people who more often use search engines,

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social media and aggregators do not have diets that are more skewed to either the left or the right.

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They do end up consuming more and more partisan news from both ends of the political spectrum.

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And of course, this is in a sense this is part and parcel of what greater diversity really means.

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And the second point is that many people who use platforms for news still don't have particularly diverse news diets.

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The span the full range of what's available online. They just have more diverse news diets than people who mainly rely on a direct access.

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Just to give you a sense of that, one of the most striking bits of data from this piece of research was that the average number of

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different news outlets people used over the entire one one month tracking period was just three.

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Hmm. Amazing, I mean, I'm not sure our listeners would have guessed that, so yeah.

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Thank you, Richard Rasmus. We've seen some bright spots in 2021, but of course, many news outlets are still going through a rough time financially.

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And one of the most striking findings from this year's digital news report is that actually,

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most people don't know about these financial struggles of the news media.

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Our data also suggest that only a minority support government intervention as a possible solution.

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So I would like to ask,

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what do you think this means for public subsidy packages like the ones that are in place or being discussed in different countries around the world?

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Well, I mean, first of all, I think we have to be realistic and recognise that sort of industry revenues for

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news media is declining and will continue to decline for the foreseeable future,

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even as some individual titles are doing very well, and that the challenges facing the commercial provision of news are particularly acute when

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it comes to local news and to news that aims to serve less privileged parts of society.

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And that, of course, raised the risk of market failure.

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And in that situation, I think we really need to sort of be very clear that public policy can make a difference for the better.

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A new deal for journalism A recent report from the Forum for Information Democracy

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reviews many of the different policy options that are backed by evidence

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ranging from direct and indirect support for private independent news media to using the creation funding of non-profits and to public service news.

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It's a purely political choice, whether we, as societies, decide to use some of these options.

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That's for each of us to make up our own minds about a citizens, whether we think this is right,

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whether we think it's a good opportunity in the society where we actually live in the context in which we operate.

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But what we can say from research is that if we go by what is currently in place,

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what policymakers are proposing and what public opinion research can tell us outside of a handful of unusual countries, it's not a very public choice.

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So take support for private news media across the 33 markets where we asked the question in the 2021 digital news report.

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It's just 27 percent who say that they would support the government stepping in

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to help commercial news organisations that can't make enough money of their own.

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And I think even more acutely, even amongst those who are most worried about the future of the news media,

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there is little support for government intervention as the solution. And whatever our personal opinions on the matter,

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I think most of us will be able to understand why much of the public is sceptical of resorting to subsidies for commercial news media.

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First of all, much of the public doesn't trust the news media. Secondly, many do not feel that the news media respect, represent and reflect them.

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Or they may fear that news media are intertwined with narrow commercial and or political interests.

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And even if they don't, they may not want their hard earned tax money handed over to news media and in some cases,

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continue to have double digit profit margins, even as they cut their newsrooms and pull out of covering local communities.

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So there are a few encouraging developments on the policy front. We are seeing increased scrutiny of competition in the online marketplace.

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We are seeing a few individual commitments, like the US federal government promising 30 million US dollars in seed funding for the

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new International Fund for Public Interest media that by Maria Ressa and Mark Thompson.

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But there are also continue to attempts to cut public service.

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Media, of course, often cheered on by many newspapers and the fact that most governments have done little or nothing to help independent news media,

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even in the depth of the coronavirus crisis that's so clearly illustrated what a crucial role they can play.

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I think it's indicative of the limited political appetite for significant public support for journalism,

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and that's without even going into how frequently what is percent of US support.

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On closer inspection may really turn out to be tools for media capture long exercised

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by strategically offering and withholding government advertising to reward and punish, for example.

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So while incumbent publishers may be able to wring a few favours out of politicians who still have reason to fear newspapers.

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Of course, politicians who may expect favours in return, I'd be surprised if we see very much policy change for the better.

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Of course, hope springs eternal.

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But I'd encourage most publishers to plan for the future on the assumption that their legacy revenues will continue to decline,

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that they have to make their living digitally, and that politicians will do nothing substantial to help them.

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Well, I'm speaking about revenues, the percentage of people paying for use,

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according to our data, is taking off in countries such as the US or Norway or Sweden.

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But progress is either much slower or non-existent in many other countries.

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And despite this,

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we are seeing examples of news organisations being successful with the revenue models in countries as diverse as Slovakia or South Africa,

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Spain, Malaysia all the way. Is there any playbook playbook that you see emerging from these success stories just to enter on a more positive note?

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I don't think there is a single playbook,

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and I hope we won't see everyone pursuing the same phantom silver bullet or converge on the same business model.

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For example, I don't think subscription is likely to work for every publisher and also advertising while in decline.

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I think we'll continue to be important for many in terms of reader revenue.

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I would say the starting point has to be that convincing people to pay for news has to start with actually asking them to do it.

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And the countries where we've seen the most growth in the percentage of people say they pay for online news are

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often countries in which initially a small number of brave publishers committed to the long term and over time,

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more and more publishers have for now for many years been building up their subscription business, so it doesn't happen overnight.

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The second thing I'd say is that I think there are at least three common features to those who are doing well in the market.

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That's characterised by a few winners and many losers. I'd say good use of editorial talent, investment in tech and commitment to use of data.

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Good use of editorial talent. By this, I mean that they are committed to producing journalism is valuable for the people who use it and

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distinct from the abundant range of alternatives that people have access to investment in tech.

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By this, I mean that they commit resources to ensure that they deliver a good product experience that

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approximate what people accustomed to platforms have come to expect and commitment to use of data.

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By this, I mean that they continually use hard evidence to evaluate and refine their offers,

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rather than be guided mostly by gut instinct or chasing fashions and industry.

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Now, I realise it's one thing to identify features like this, and it's another entirely to be able to pursue them in practise,

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and it is a very challenging market, especially for local titles and importantly for titles that serve some of the least privileged parts of society.

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But these, I think, are some of the common features across both the biggest and most visibly successful titles,

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which are often up-market national titles like Dagestan or in Sweden,

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Le Monde in France or The New York Times in the U.S., all in high income democracies.

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But also even more importantly, I think these are common themes or common features across many of the smaller players and newer entrants,

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often operating in less affluent and sometimes more challenging markets,

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whether Denmark and Slovakia, English, Cheyney or the Daily Maverick in South Africa.

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And in that sense, I hope that publishers elsewhere will both recognise that pay may not be for everyone, but for those who want to pursue it,

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that it takes time off often years and thus require a commitment to the long term,

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and that there are some real lessons that have been learnt that does involve investing in good use of editorial talent.

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Investing in technology. And a commitment to use data in pursuing one's business opportunities and editorial ambitions.

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Hmm. Thank you. Rasmus, before the end of this episode, I would like you all to make a wish for journalism in 2021.

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Something hopeful. I mean, we did this last year. Let's see what you would like to see in the new year.

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Let's start with you, Fredricka. I would like to see NEWSROOM really taking care of their talent and really running inclusive newsrooms,

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so really thinking about how to acquire the time they need,

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how to nurture it in order to retain it and having much more empathetic yet operational, operationally efficient newsroom with an eye to diversity.

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Let's hope for that. What would you like to see in the New Year mirror?

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Well, Dmitri MOTOACTV and Maria Ressa won the Nobel Peace prise this year with a clear

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call to arms for the protection of journalists and the safety of journalists.

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So what I would really like to see is a fundamental shift in society where we respect

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the right of journalists to at least do their jobs without the threat of harm or worse.

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Hopefully there will be a bit more true in the new year, thanking the richer.

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What's your wish for journalism in 2022? Well, last year you asked for this question and I said responsible coverage of the vaccine rollout,

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and here we are a year later and this is still my wish.

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And of course, it applies both in countries that are still in the initial stages, as well as those currently rolling out booster jabs.

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I think it's a great wish and a very timely one. Thank you. And Rasmus, where's your wish?

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I hope that in the profession of journalism that we focus more on the journalism

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that we want in the future and less on the journalism we have in the past. That's a big, big question.

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Hopefully, it will be a bit more true in 2022. Thanks to our research and thanks to our fellowship and leadership programme.

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Thank you all for being with us today. Thank you.

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Thank you. Our guests, merry Christmas.

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Our guest today, where our director, Rasmussen, our deputy director, Russell, by the leader of our research team,

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Richard Fletcher and our head of leadership development, Federica Creativity.

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Make sure you follow our podcast channel on Spotify or Apple Podcasts so you don't miss the next episode.

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And if you don't want to miss any news from the institute.

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Please subscribe to our weekly newsletter by clicking on the link on our Twitter bio or on our homepage.

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Thank you for listening to our podcasts. We wish you happy holidays and plenty of health for you and your family in the new year.

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I'm Eduardo's Riley from the Reuters Institute. We'll be back soon.