Future of Journalism
What do we know about the future of journalism?
The rise of digital media has empowered people worldwide but also enabled the spread of disinformation and demagoguery and undermined the funding of professional journalism as we know it.
The move from a media environment defined by broadcasting and newspapers to a digital, mobile, and platform-dominated environment is the most fundamental change in how we communicate since the development of the printing press, and we are only thirty years into a period we can trace back to Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web in 1989.
What do we know so far about the implications for journalism and by extension politics?
Some key broad trends can be clearly documented, and they are sometimes at odds with much of what is asserted in public and elite debate.
Too often, discussions of the future of media are based on misunderstandings or outright “media change denial” where people double down on arguments that are directly contradicted by a growing consensus among researchers.
Here are five things we believe everybody needs to know about the future of journalism[RN1] , all backed by evidence-based research.
First, we have moved from a world where media organisations were gatekeepers to a world where media still create the news agenda, but platform companies control access to audiences
Established news media tend to be at the centre of online discussions of, for example, elections, and often drive the agenda.
But we have moved from a world where media organisations controlled both content and channels and we came to news directly by going to a specific broadcaster or publisher, to a world increasingly characterised by “distributed discovery”, where media organisations still create content, but people access it through platform channels like search engines, social media, and news aggregators.
In 2018, two-thirds of online news users surveyed across 37 different markets worldwide identified distributed forms of discovery as their main way of accessing and finding news online. (See Figure 1.) Amongst those under 35, three-quarters relied primarily on social media, search engines, and the like.
Read more...
The rise of digital media has empowered people worldwide but also enabled the spread of disinformation and demagoguery and undermined the funding of professional journalism as we know it.
The move from a media environment defined by broadcasting and newspapers to a digital, mobile, and platform-dominated environment is the most fundamental change in how we communicate since the development of the printing press, and we are only thirty years into a period we can trace back to Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web in 1989.
What do we know so far about the implications for journalism and by extension politics?
Some key broad trends can be clearly documented, and they are sometimes at odds with much of what is asserted in public and elite debate.
Too often, discussions of the future of media are based on misunderstandings or outright “media change denial” where people double down on arguments that are directly contradicted by a growing consensus among researchers.
Here are five things we believe everybody needs to know about the future of journalism[RN1] , all backed by evidence-based research.
First, we have moved from a world where media organisations were gatekeepers to a world where media still create the news agenda, but platform companies control access to audiences
Established news media tend to be at the centre of online discussions of, for example, elections, and often drive the agenda.
But we have moved from a world where media organisations controlled both content and channels and we came to news directly by going to a specific broadcaster or publisher, to a world increasingly characterised by “distributed discovery”, where media organisations still create content, but people access it through platform channels like search engines, social media, and news aggregators.
In 2018, two-thirds of online news users surveyed across 37 different markets worldwide identified distributed forms of discovery as their main way of accessing and finding news online. (See Figure 1.) Amongst those under 35, three-quarters relied primarily on social media, search engines, and the like.
Read more...
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