Given how central journalists like to say their profession is to keeping the public informed, you might think that relentless retrenchment in the industry over the past decade would leave people feeling adrift, struggling to make sense of the world, and lacking access to the information they need. You would be wrong.
People watch a lot less television news than they did 10 years ago, and read far fewer printed newspapers, and the number who go to online news sites—rather than relying on social media, search engines, aggregators and the like—is stagnant at best. So is the number of people willing to pay for online news. These trends have for years wreaked havoc on the traditional business of news, leading to thousands of layoffs in newsrooms across the UK. But they do not seem to leave the public feeling lost.
Large majorities say—in surveys we have done at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford—that they are able to access all or most of the information they need, including on traditional hard news topics. For international news and business news, around two-thirds are satisfied. For political news, arguably at the core of the notion of journalism as a fourth estate and central to the way the profession thinks about itself, 69 per cent can access what they need. Even for local news—which is under the biggest financial pressure in a winner-takes-most online environment—the figure is 57 per cent.
Audiences—and consequently advertisers—are drifting away from news media and towards all the different kinds of content that is available online and now also via AI-powered chatbots. This is a crisis for journalism as we knew it. But it is not seen as a crisis by the public.
That is not because people confuse easily accessible online information with a robust and vibrant news media industry. While most people are quite positive about many aspects of the information environment they operate in, their verdict about journalism and news is pretty withering. Half the public say they fear the news media are subject to undue business influence, and about the same number believe journalists manipulate the public to serve the agenda of powerful politicians. Trust in news is down dramatically. Much of the public says journalists care more about getting attention than reporting the facts, are only in it for the money, and only a minority believe journalists independently verify the information that they report. The press likes to think of itself as a watchdog. Much of the public thinks of it as a lapdog, or worse.
People’s personal connection with news has changed too. In a context where most of us spend ever more time with a greater variety of media, interest in news is down, and the number of people who say they feel worn out by the amount of news, or actively try to avoid it, is up.
So it is not just the case that the business of news is challenged, or that people are sceptical of news media and generally hold journalism in low regard—though both of these things are true. It is that on almost every measurable indicator, the social contract between much of the public and the news, as traditionally conceived, reported and distributed, is coming apart. And while this is a full-blown crisis for journalism and the news media, the public at large seems sanguine about the whole situation.
The contract isn’t coming apart because people can’t access journalism, but because they increasingly don’t. People still want reliable, relevant information from sources independent of those in power in business and government. In fact, mountains of research suggest that people appreciate the ideal aspirations of journalism, and want news that helps them understand the world, offers a range of perspectives and maintains independence from those it covers. The contract is coming apart because much of the public does not believe actually existing journalism offers this.
So where do people get their information if they increasingly do not get it directly from journalists and news media? Social media and video platforms, especially Facebook and YouTube, and for younger people, also Instagram and TikTok. Search engines, principally Google. Aggregators, including Apple News and Google News. Messaging apps and emails, through which contacts forward each other screenshots, links and bits of text.
In daily life, news is less something people get in concentrated doses from a few key providers that they habitually rely upon, and more something that is distributed across many different platforms, and often encountered incidentally. It is everywhere and nowhere.
As a term, “news” is still associated with professional journalists and the media they work for, but news more broadly is no longer their domain exclusively. Information about Gaza might come from the few correspondents still in the area, or from independent journalists bearing witness on the ground, such as Bisan Owda and Motaz Azaiza. Opinion about it might come from paid pundits writing for national newspapers, or from activists raising their voices online. Cultural coverage might come from journalists passing judgement on the latest books or movies for a living, or from any number of creators and influencers doing the same.
Social media is the clearest example of how the traditional package of a printed newspaper has been “unbundled” into many different voices and sources that people choose to follow or have recommended to them, mixed in with content from friends, family and acquaintances. Fewer than half of people who get their news on social media platforms report generally paying attention to mainstream news brands or journalists on those sites. Journalists and their employers now compete with a multitude of other voices on platforms owned by third-party companies that have their own interests.
The news media has not been wholesale displaced by influencers. Instead, attention is distributed among many different voices, including activists, celebrities, creators, politicians and smaller online outlets. Many represent experiences and views that historically have been poorly represented by journalists and the news media, on subjects including Gaza, climate, gender and racial justice. The new public square is not centred on a stable set of shared sources; instead it is structured by a small number of competing, for-profit platform companies bundling a bewildering array of stuff for different people in different ways through various ranking and recommendation algorithms.
Audiences and advertisers seem to prefer this new reality, insofar as they vote for it every day with their attention and their money. Their turning away from news media has undoubtedly had a dramatic impact on the incumbent business of newspapers in particular, and has been accompanied by growing concern, frequently expressed by pundits working for the very news media being disrupted, about misinformation and filter bubbles.
Some of these issues provoke widespread public apprehension. In the UK, 70 per cent say they are concerned about what is real and what is fake in online news, and people generally trust news found through search engines and social media even less than they trust news in general. But digital platforms are widely appreciated by the public for making it easier to connect with other people, find information, express yourself and participate in politics. For all the talk of “techlash” and a sense of frustration with social media, more people in the UK say new technologies are making society better than say they are making it worse.
Are they right? Some of the fears associated with digital media are overstated. In the UK, at the height of the Covid pandemic, outlets identified as repeatedly publishing false content accounted for an estimated 0.016 per cent of web traffic to news, and 0.85 per cent of Facebook engagement with news—a fraction of the traffic that went to credible news media.
Several studies have found that algorithms actually lead people to slightly more diverse news than what they seek out of their own volition. Few people only get news from outlets that are aligned with their pre-existing political beliefs—around 2 per cent are in online right-wing echo chambers in the UK, and 5 per cent are in left-wing ones. This is hundreds of thousands of people, but it is still a minority phenomenon.
A less-discussed but far more fundamental issue is the marginalisation of news. The news media is losing touch with the public in an ever-more intense competition for attention online. More than one in four British internet users report not having used any news brands online in the past week. It turns out fewer people go to news media when they can get all the other stuff—opinion, lifestyle, sports, food, information about community events, restaurants, shops, weather, whatever—elsewhere.
Our survey data suggests that, across their online and offline offers, British national newspapers combined reached about two-thirds of the public at least once a week in 2015. By 2024, that figure was down to little more than a third. The retrenchment among local papers is equally dramatic, with weekly reach down from 22 per cent of the adult population in 2015 to 12 per cent in 2024.
A couple of haut bourgeois newspapers are doing OK, primarily those that serve an affluent, highly educated and often older niche audience that is particularly interested in news and politics. The Guardian has grown its audience and mobilised donors globally. The Economist and the Financial Times are doing well. Beyond this segment, the Mail Online has built a huge following around its mix of outrage, titillation and news. But the newspaper industry as a whole is much diminished.
Against this great decline, there are a few news outlets that still have wide reach in the UK. Sixty-four per cent of the public reports using the BBC at least weekly as a source of news, and 62 per cent rate it trustworthy, including a majority of those who identify as politically on the right. Resented by its commercial competitors who relentlessly lobby against it, detested by Brexiteers and Corbynistas alike, necessarily often at odds with government (as long as it does any proper journalism), it has weathered a succession of de facto budget cuts that started under New Labour and have continued under the coalition and Conservatives since.
Battered as it is, the BBC remains the main thin red line standing—along with ITV and Sky, as commercial broadcasters bound by regulation to broadly similar standards of due impartiality—between the UK and the kind of fragmented, partisan and deeply unequal media free-for-all seen in the United States.
The public doesn’t miss yesterday’s news, but journalists miss the public. Without people willing to pay attention to the work that they do, journalism will fade.
Most people feel perfectly capable of accessing the information they need on most topics, even if they have only fleeting and casual contact with professional journalism and established news media. They are, quite sensibly, wary of the integrity of a lot of online information, but also generally confident in their own ability to tell trustworthy and untrustworthy information apart. Research suggests this confidence is largely warranted—there is a high correlation between the sources people trust and those that experts rate as accurate. A large meta-analysis of studies involving 194,438 participants from 40 countries (including the UK) finds that people are generally able to discern true from false news and, if anything, err on the side of scepticism rather than credulity.
Given that people do not seem to value or often use what most news media have to offer, it is not surprising that the travails of commercial news media are met with little public sympathy. There is still considerable public support for the BBC, but just 11 per cent of people in the UK express any support for the idea of government stepping in to help commercial news organisations that can’t make enough money on their own.
Elected officials are also unlikely to help. From a principled point of view, it is not clear why journalists who seek to hold power to account would ask those in power for favours. Given the majoritarian nature of the British political system, who would want independent journalism to be reliant on the whims of a Boris Johnson or a Tony Blair, the latter of whom famously compared the news media to a “feral beast”?
Supporting journalism and news media is clearly not a priority for any UK political party. The Starmer government’s commitment of additional funding for the BBC World Service and its decision to incrementally increase the licence fee is a change of course, but accounts for a fraction of the funding that has effectively been cut by successive governments in recent decades.
The sensible, actionable, practical recommendations put forward in 2019 by the Cairncross Review on a sustainable future for journalism were met with inaction and indifference from both government and opposition. Of the more than 300 pages of 2024 election manifestos from the three major parties, there was only passing mention of anything to do with journalism and news media.
With the partial exception of Google, whose stated mission is to make the world’s information “universally accessible and useful”, the platform companies that dominate how people access and discover content are also keeping their distance. Amazon is increasingly investing in media and growing its advertising business, but has little to do with news. Apple, aside from its aggregator, the same. Microsoft offers Bing for search, LinkedIn for social media, the MSN portal and the Copilot generative AI assistant, but little when it comes to news media. Meta for a time reduced the amount of news shown on Facebook, and has worked to keep news at the margins of its other platforms. X seems increasingly suffused with its owner Elon Musk’s aggressive hostility towards the press.
The press could end up with a role akin to contemporary art or classical music
Most companies are happy to serve their users material of any kind from anyone who operates in line with their platform’s commercial and content-moderation terms. They are willing to pay for distinct, unique, valuable content via lucrative deals for megastars, investment in original programming and licensing of sports and movie rights. But, just like most of the public, they are generally not willing to pay for news. In countries where politicians have forced platforms to pay news outlets for hosting their journalism, such as Australia and Canada, companies have often reduced the amount of news they display in favour of other content. On social media especially, news is—as Facebook has pointed out in a self-interested but plausible argument—“highly substitutable”.
So far, the main result of reducing the amount of news a platform carries has been less traffic to news publishers, not less social media usage. And, perhaps informed in part by years of public spats between Google and Meta on the one side and news publishers on the other, newer platforms such as Snapchat and TikTok tend to feature much less conventional news in the first place, and represent an even more challenging environment for news publishers than legacy social media platforms.
In Australia, legislation that attempted to force platforms to pay for hosting news had a “fundamental problem”, according to the Australian Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society. It presumed that “social media platforms want to carry news, or that certain digital platforms consistently need news content to provide a service”. If nothing else, we have learned this was wrong. So, no one is coming to the rescue. The profession and the industry are on their own.
You might think that such an evident, ongoing and profound crisis would have spurred innovation. But 30 years after the Telegraph was the first British newspaper to launch a website, the main innovation that has come from inside the industry seems to be the live blog, with most other digital changes begrudgingly adopted long after audiences and advertisers demonstrated their appetite for something new. The response to a crisis has, it seems, mostly been publishing more of the same, often by ever fewer, ever more harried journalists.
General shift reporters at Reach PLC, the UK’s largest local and regional publisher, have been expected to write “at least eight stories a shift”. These stories are sometimes rewritten and reposted across sister titles elsewhere in the country, increasingly using generative AI. When Press Gazette looked at the UK’s six biggest commercial news websites in 2022 to assess how much original journalism was being produced, only two primarily published original work. A clear majority of content on most websites was a mix of press releases, wire copy, rewrites of competitors’ reporting and content lifted from social media platforms and recycled as journalism. Is it surprising that people do not see this stream of stuff as distinct, valuable and engaging, let alone worth paying for? Producing more of it will only cement the media’s decline.
A few legacy publishers have found a path forward that works both editorially and commercially, but much of the industry is struggling to adapt. Perhaps the next generation of leaders will have new ideas; perhaps Lachlan Murdoch represents a break with Rupert, perhaps Vere Harmsworth stands for something different from his father, Lord Rothermere. Time will tell.
Meanwhile, there are green shoots, as relatively new entrants try to carve out a space for themselves. They range from the network of local news sites launched by Mill Media to the nonprofit Bureau of Investigative Journalism, slow news publisher Tortoise, TLDR and Politics Joe. Further removed from traditional news media, Bellingcat, Carbon Brief, Forensic Architecture, Full Fact and Our World in Data all serve needs that might in the past have been served by the printed press.
This space too, is difficult, as the closures of Gal-Dem, the Lincolnite and other interesting initiatives show. Legacy and new media face many of the same challenges: competition for attention and advertising, platforms controlling distribution and data, and a public that is sympathetic to the ideals of journalism, but often unconvinced of the value and values of what they see of it.
If journalists and the news media they work for cannot address that last fact—that people are so clearly unimpressed with what they think they have to offer, and so many feel entirely able to navigate the world with little or no help from journalism—things are only going to get worse for the profession and the industry.
Current trends point, at best, to a continued retreat, as the press serves fewer and fewer people, ultimately ending up with a role akin to contemporary art or classical music: highly valued by a privileged few, regarded with indifference by the many. At worst, the lack of substantial innovation leaves a growing number of historically independent news media vulnerable to takeover by proprietors who, as we have seen in the past, and will probably see even more in the future, put politics ahead of their commitment to publishing.
A different story begins with the recognition that the existential crisis for journalism is not seen that way by much of the public. While many people retain a sound scepticism of aspects of the digital media environment, they also appreciate much of what it has to offer, and choose it every day at the expense of declining legacy media. Scare stories about the problems associated with digital media will not bring people back to news. A wiser course of action might be to impress people, rather than try to depress them.
The people best positioned to forge a different path are those journalists and publishers who accept that the next step is to meet people where they are. The aim should not be to take journalism backwards, but to create something new.
