Challenges and Opportunities for News Media and Journalism in an Increasingly Digital, Mobile, and Social Media Environment
This report was commissioned by the Council of Europe and produced by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. It reviews challenges and opportunities for news media and journalism in today's changing media environment. It documents that we are moving towards an increasingly digital, mobile, and social media environment with more intense competition for attention. More and more people get news via digital media, they increasingly access news via mobile devices (especially smartphones) and rely on social media and other intermediaries in terms of how they access and find news. In this environment, a limited number of large technology companies enable billions of users across the world to navigate and use digital media in easy and attractive ways through services like search, social networking, video sharing, and messaging. As a consequence, these companies play a more and more important role in terms of (a) the distribution of news and (b) digital advertising. Legacy media like broadcasters and especially newspapers by contrast are becoming relatively less important as distributors of news even as they remain very important producers of news. They are also under growing pressure to develop new digital business models as their existing sources of revenue decline or stagnate. The general response from legacy media has been a combination of (a) investment in pursuing digital opportunities, (b) cost cutting and (c) attempts at market consolidation in pursuit of market power and economies of scale. Because of the competition for attention and advertising, and the limited number of people who pay for online news, there are very few examples of legacy media that make a profit from their digital news operations despite twenty years of often substantial investments and sometimes significant audience reach. It is not clear that the new environment is significantly more hospitable for digital born news media organisations. While they often have a lower cost base and can be more nimble in adapting to change, they face similar competition for both attention and advertising and so far represent a small part of overall investment in journalism. For citizens, the move towards an increasingly digital, mobile, and social media environment represent the development of a more high choice environment in most respects though there is less diversity in terms of original, professionally produced news on some issues and areas, especially locally. Internet users have access to more information in convenient formats and often for free, across a range of increasingly sophisticated personal and mobile devices, and in ways that enable new forms of participation. Those most interested embrace these new opportunities to get, share, and comment on news, but a larger number of people opt for more casual and passive forms of use and mostly use the many opportunities offered by digital media for things that have little to do with news. In combination, these developments mean that internet users have access to more and more information from more and more sources, increasing the opportunities most people have to use diverse sources and encounter different perspectives. At the same time the environment is increasingly dominated by a limited number of very large players and accompanied by consolidation and cost cutting elsewhere in the media landscape. This can over time reduce media pluralism by undermining the diversity of news production. The move to an increasingly digital, mobile, and social media environment also means that forms of policy intervention developed in and designed for twentieth century media environments will need reform to be effective and efficient in twenty first century media environments, in particular when it comes to (1) effectively addressing potential market failures in the production of the public good of independent, professional, quality journalism, (2) securing an efficient and competitive media market place, and (3) ensuring that citizens develop the media and information literacy necessary to navigate the media environment effectively in their own best interest.