Welcome to the Future of Journalism, a podcast from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
I'm Eduardo Schweddy. 2021 has been an important year for journalism.
The pandemic has accelerated the shift to hybrid work. News companies have grappled with familiar challenges, such as debunking false information,
combating climate change and tackling the lack of diversity,
and also more newsrooms have embraced through the revenue to fight declines in advertising and in print sales.
So how has this year changed journalism around the world?
My guests today are four of my colleagues, our director, Rasmus Nielsen, our deputy director, Mira Scelta,
the leader of our research team, Richard Fletcher and our head of leadership development, Federica Catalini.
All of them have published research that can help us understand what's happened
in journalism in 2021 and how some of these challenges can play out in 2022.
Rasmus Mirra Richard Federico, welcome and thank you for being with us today.
Thank you. Thanks, Eduardo. Thanks for having us.
So let's start with you for the recap 2021 Hasbro, the first discussions in the issues around flexibility,
and it has also accelerated the shift to remote work and hybrid work.
So you are the lead author of a recent report about these topics.
How have news of organisations dealt with the inevitable trade offs throughout this year?
Is there any interesting examples out there thanks to the order?
Yes. As you mentioned in the Changing NEWSROOM report we published in November,
we've look at the shift from enforced remote to hybrid and flexible working in
those places around the world where it was possible to do so in a safe way,
of course.
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.
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,
this is a sort of like balance between flexibility,
equity and operational requirement that this shift requires so concretely who and when is in the office.
What roles might be more suited to be in the office? And who decides when and how to be in the office?
And throughout that, of course, they need to navigate the complexity of the gains that we've seen in efficiency, for example.
But the things I collaboration and communication has been made much harder,
according to our survey respondent, and things like how to run inclusive hybrid meeting.
What about proximity bias?
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,
even if not a conscious one, by just being by the virtue of being there and being person.
Also making sure that hybrid working does not reinforce disparities.
Think of people with childcare responsibilities, for example, caring responsibilities in general,
thinking about the added pressure on managers and how the ones left with navigating all of this complexity.
So many level of complexity that will require careful and very intentional planning from newsroom leaders.
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
the news industry in terms of addressing its lack of diversity in terms of output leadership staff.
And yet our survey of leaders suggests that many newsrooms are doing actually nothing to tackle these issues.
For any hour of our listeners working on one of these companies,
could you give us any examples of news organisations actually taking useful steps to tackle these?
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.
Some of the things that our respondents in the survey mentioned is, for example,
tracking data on diversity of staff, tracking data on diversity of leadership position,
for example, having someone in charge of diversity and inclusive practise, but, you know, having a budget to bid behind those things.
I think the example that are interesting from from this area is both in terms of like increasing the pipeline.
For example, we have a few respondents who mentioned initiative to try to attract people from less advantaged background and, for example,
hosting events for students or young readers from those less advantaged backgrounds to show how the
news industry works and make it look like more appealing and more representative for them as well.
But of course, thinking about all the levels of the organisation.
Companies like Quartz, for example, have turned into a fully remote and work from everywhere company.
And they said in our report that that helped significantly with increasing, for example,
diversity of the candidates that could apply for jobs and really help them increase the performance in terms of diversity.
So really thinking about both getting diverse, diverse people with diverse backgrounds with, you know, in the door, in the first place.
But once they are in the company really thinking about how can we have truly inclusive newsrooms and news organisations?
Hmm. Let's go from diversity to another issue that new south.
Far as tracking with and that is climate change Mira, in early October, we launched the Oxford Climate Journalism Network,
a project whose goal is to help newsrooms improve their coverage of global warming around the world.
You are one of the co-founders of the project and you are actually leading the project itself.
So how are we going to achieve this goal? Hi, Eduardo.
Yep, so the Oxford Climate Journalism Network is going to create a network of journalists from around the world,
from key newsrooms and from key reporting outlets. And the network is designed to give them the skills,
the space to discuss and to learn from experts that will put in front of them through a series of online courses.
And also, crucially, from each other.
And the idea is to create a kind of global knowledge sharing network where the knowledge sharing goes in all directions.
And we're also going to work with senior editors and key newsroom managers to figure out how to build newsrooms
in order to do the kind of new kind of journalism that we need to report the climate story effectively.
Hmm. Because I guess I mean, the question there is,
what would you say are the main challenges facing journalism when improving their coverage of this very, very important topic?
Is it the nature of the topic itself?
Is it the structure of the newsrooms or is it also the lack of literacy of reporters and editors around this issue?
It's a combination of factors. The key thing is that the climate story is both increased incredibly immediate.
It's happening outside your window right now, and it's also very, very long.
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,
to report on something with tremendous intensity and to get the attribution correct, for example,
to report on the uncertainty, but also to stay on the topic,
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.
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,
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,
but also to really understand that climate reporting is not a separate beat that can be hived off into a corner,
that it's something that affects politics and sport and travel and economics and social events as well.
That is so important. You're also the director of our journalism fellowship programme,
and you select and host those hands of very talented journalists every year and listen to their conversations here in Oxford.
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?
Absolutely. And we learnt so much. The key thing is that connexions matter.
So we've had an in-person fellowship and people have really made an effort to come to Oxford,
where masks get vaccinated and be in the room together, and they have gained a huge amount.
We've had journalists from Kashmir, from Hong Kong working with journalists, from London and from the United States,
and they have all come from in different ways, very difficult environments,
and they've gained a lot of solidarity and lot of strength in being together.
What we've also learnt from journalists is how much courage it requires to be a journalist.
And when you keep your head down, stay out of trouble and when you go into battle to get the story out.
And it's a balance that sadly that too many journalists are having to deal with pretty much every day.
Thank you, Richard. One of the chapters of the year of this year.
Digital news report explains how different groups perceive how the news media covers them,
and some of this has to do with politics or polarisation or diversity.
As we discussed before with Fredricka, which groups feel unfairly treated by the news media and what can you tell us about their grievances?
Yes, as you mentioned, this is one of the areas that we explore for the first time in digital news report this year.
So just as a reminder, this is a survey of news.
Audiences across around 40 different media markets and what we were looking at was whether people think that people like them
are covered fairly or unfairly by the news media and because we wanted to go beyond people's general view of media coverage.
We asked more specific questions. So we asked, for example, whether people think the news media covers, covers people their age, fairly people,
their gender, fairly people with their political views, fairly where they're from, fairly and so on and so on.
And when it comes to age, we find that in most countries,
people who are aged around 50 are the most likely to think that people their age are covered fairly by the news media.
But when we look either side of this, they're looking at the older age groups in the younger age groups.
We see the figures start to fall and in particular, the youngest age group in our data,
the 18 to 20 year are, in some countries, the least likely to think they are covered fairly.
And in a country like the UK, just as one example,
the 18 to 24 is a twice as likely to say that COVID unfairly versus fairly so a big difference within that group.
In some countries, women are less likely to think they're covered fairly by the news media are the men.
And this is particularly true for younger women, who again in some countries are more likely to say that COVID unfairly versus fairly.
And we also saw some interesting differences in how fair people think the coverage is of where they live,
and the patterns vary according to which country you look at. But I can give you a sense of it.
So in the UK, people who are further away from London are less likely to think where they live as covered fairly, for example.
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,
people are more likely to say that they're covered unfairly in that case.
And there's also we see a similar pattern again in in Germany,
where people in the former eastern states are less likely to say that the media covers where they live fairly.
And lastly, the other really important factor for these kind of judgements is politics.
So political partisans on both the left and the right are typically more likely to say that they're
covered unfairly compared to people who put themselves in the centre of the political spectrum.
Of course, it's important to keep in mind that these are people's perceptions,
so we may can't necessarily use the data to to to to to to learn what we think about the coverage itself.
And because because it may or may not be a result of the coverage, it could also just be people's perceptions.
And this is particularly relevant when we think about something like political partisanship,
because research on the so-called hostile media phenomenon,
this showing that partisans from different sides can sometimes think that the same coverage is biased against them.
But nonetheless, perceptions are still very important, especially as we we think about something like trust, for example.
Hmm. Totally.
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,
and that's a piece that suggests that people that use search and social and aggregators have actually more they versus news diets,
contrary to what many listeners may expect and contrary to some of the talk about filter bubbles,
an echo chamber, etc. So how did you reach this conclusion and what do you make of it?
Well, this finding is based on some desktop and laptop web tracking data collected by YouGov in the in the UK in 2017.
And as you mentioned, in line with other research, we found that rather than enclosing users into filter bubbles where algorithmic news
recommended supposedly filtering out information that people don't want to see or don't like.
We found that social media search engines,
aggregators and other similar services are actually more likely to show people news from outlets they wouldn't normally use.
Ultimately,
leaving them with more diverse news diets and also news diets that are more balanced across different outlets with different editorial lines.
And we think this happens in part because if people are left to their own devices when it comes to getting news online,
most people don't have particularly diverse news repertoires.
So many people hardly use any online news at all, even if they're using lots of news offline, but also outside of platforms.
People form strong habits where they voluntarily choose to go back to the same websites over and over again.
But it's also in part because when people are using social media search engines and aggregators,
they really have less direct control over what outlets they come into contact with.
So if someone goes to a search engine, for example, and puts in a news query that often in practise,
end up clicking on an article from an outlet they wouldn't normally go to process,
which we've called elsewhere automated serendipity and on social media.
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.
They can also be incidentally exposed to news while they're looking to connect with friends and to themselves, or just pass the time.
And of course, this is something that's particularly important for diversity amongst people who don't otherwise consume very much news online.
That being said, I think it's also important to stress a couple of points.
So first, although people who more often use search engines,
social media and aggregators do not have diets that are more skewed to either the left or the right.
They do end up consuming more and more partisan news from both ends of the political spectrum.
And of course, this is in a sense this is part and parcel of what greater diversity really means.
And the second point is that many people who use platforms for news still don't have particularly diverse news diets.
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.
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
different news outlets people used over the entire one one month tracking period was just three.
Hmm. Amazing, I mean, I'm not sure our listeners would have guessed that, so yeah.
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.
And one of the most striking findings from this year's digital news report is that actually,
most people don't know about these financial struggles of the news media.
Our data also suggest that only a minority support government intervention as a possible solution.
So I would like to ask,
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?
Well, I mean, first of all, I think we have to be realistic and recognise that sort of industry revenues for
news media is declining and will continue to decline for the foreseeable future,
even as some individual titles are doing very well, and that the challenges facing the commercial provision of news are particularly acute when
it comes to local news and to news that aims to serve less privileged parts of society.
And that, of course, raised the risk of market failure.
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.
A new deal for journalism A recent report from the Forum for Information Democracy
reviews many of the different policy options that are backed by evidence
ranging from direct and indirect support for private independent news media to using the creation funding of non-profits and to public service news.
It's a purely political choice, whether we, as societies, decide to use some of these options.
That's for each of us to make up our own minds about a citizens, whether we think this is right,
whether we think it's a good opportunity in the society where we actually live in the context in which we operate.
But what we can say from research is that if we go by what is currently in place,
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.
So take support for private news media across the 33 markets where we asked the question in the 2021 digital news report.
It's just 27 percent who say that they would support the government stepping in
to help commercial news organisations that can't make enough money of their own.
And I think even more acutely, even amongst those who are most worried about the future of the news media,
there is little support for government intervention as the solution. And whatever our personal opinions on the matter,
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.
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.
Or they may fear that news media are intertwined with narrow commercial and or political interests.
And even if they don't, they may not want their hard earned tax money handed over to news media and in some cases,
continue to have double digit profit margins, even as they cut their newsrooms and pull out of covering local communities.
So there are a few encouraging developments on the policy front. We are seeing increased scrutiny of competition in the online marketplace.
We are seeing a few individual commitments, like the US federal government promising 30 million US dollars in seed funding for the
new International Fund for Public Interest media that by Maria Ressa and Mark Thompson.
But there are also continue to attempts to cut public service.
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,
even in the depth of the coronavirus crisis that's so clearly illustrated what a crucial role they can play.
I think it's indicative of the limited political appetite for significant public support for journalism,
and that's without even going into how frequently what is percent of US support.
On closer inspection may really turn out to be tools for media capture long exercised
by strategically offering and withholding government advertising to reward and punish, for example.
So while incumbent publishers may be able to wring a few favours out of politicians who still have reason to fear newspapers.
Of course, politicians who may expect favours in return, I'd be surprised if we see very much policy change for the better.
Of course, hope springs eternal.
But I'd encourage most publishers to plan for the future on the assumption that their legacy revenues will continue to decline,
that they have to make their living digitally, and that politicians will do nothing substantial to help them.
Well, I'm speaking about revenues, the percentage of people paying for use,
according to our data, is taking off in countries such as the US or Norway or Sweden.
But progress is either much slower or non-existent in many other countries.
And despite this,
we are seeing examples of news organisations being successful with the revenue models in countries as diverse as Slovakia or South Africa,
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?
I don't think there is a single playbook,
and I hope we won't see everyone pursuing the same phantom silver bullet or converge on the same business model.
For example, I don't think subscription is likely to work for every publisher and also advertising while in decline.
I think we'll continue to be important for many in terms of reader revenue.
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.
And the countries where we've seen the most growth in the percentage of people say they pay for online news are
often countries in which initially a small number of brave publishers committed to the long term and over time,
more and more publishers have for now for many years been building up their subscription business, so it doesn't happen overnight.
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.
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.
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
distinct from the abundant range of alternatives that people have access to investment in tech.
By this, I mean that they commit resources to ensure that they deliver a good product experience that
approximate what people accustomed to platforms have come to expect and commitment to use of data.
By this, I mean that they continually use hard evidence to evaluate and refine their offers,
rather than be guided mostly by gut instinct or chasing fashions and industry.
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,
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.
But these, I think, are some of the common features across both the biggest and most visibly successful titles,
which are often up-market national titles like Dagestan or in Sweden,
Le Monde in France or The New York Times in the U.S., all in high income democracies.
But also even more importantly, I think these are common themes or common features across many of the smaller players and newer entrants,
often operating in less affluent and sometimes more challenging markets,
whether Denmark and Slovakia, English, Cheyney or the Daily Maverick in South Africa.
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,
that it takes time off often years and thus require a commitment to the long term,
and that there are some real lessons that have been learnt that does involve investing in good use of editorial talent.
Investing in technology. And a commitment to use data in pursuing one's business opportunities and editorial ambitions.
Hmm. Thank you. Rasmus, before the end of this episode, I would like you all to make a wish for journalism in 2021.
Something hopeful. I mean, we did this last year. Let's see what you would like to see in the new year.
Let's start with you, Fredricka. I would like to see NEWSROOM really taking care of their talent and really running inclusive newsrooms,
so really thinking about how to acquire the time they need,
how to nurture it in order to retain it and having much more empathetic yet operational, operationally efficient newsroom with an eye to diversity.
Let's hope for that. What would you like to see in the New Year mirror?
Well, Dmitri MOTOACTV and Maria Ressa won the Nobel Peace prise this year with a clear
call to arms for the protection of journalists and the safety of journalists.
So what I would really like to see is a fundamental shift in society where we respect
the right of journalists to at least do their jobs without the threat of harm or worse.
Hopefully there will be a bit more true in the new year, thanking the richer.
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,
and here we are a year later and this is still my wish.
And of course, it applies both in countries that are still in the initial stages, as well as those currently rolling out booster jabs.
I think it's a great wish and a very timely one. Thank you. And Rasmus, where's your wish?
I hope that in the profession of journalism that we focus more on the journalism
that we want in the future and less on the journalism we have in the past. That's a big, big question.
Hopefully, it will be a bit more true in 2022. Thanks to our research and thanks to our fellowship and leadership programme.
Thank you all for being with us today. Thank you.
Thank you. Our guests, merry Christmas.
Our guest today, where our director, Rasmussen, our deputy director, Russell, by the leader of our research team,
Richard Fletcher and our head of leadership development, Federica Creativity.
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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.
I'm Eduardo's Riley from the Reuters Institute. We'll be back soon.