This week…
The body of this newsletter is lifted from the recently released Digital News Report 2022 by the Reuters Institute (no affiliation) with data from 46 countries and more than 93,000 respondents (at least 2,000 per country).
Below that, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
What young audiences want
Kirsten Eddy for Reuters Institute:
We consider how social natives (18–24s) – who largely grew up in the world of the social, participatory web – differ meaningfully from digital natives (25–34s) – who largely grew up in the information age but before the rise of social networks – when it comes to news access, formats, and attitudes. These groups are critical audiences for publishers and journalists around the world, and for the sustainability of the news, but are increasingly hard to reach and may require different strategies to engage them.
Journalists vs news brands
Craig T. Robertson and Nic Newman for Reuters Institute:
Do the journalists people say they pay attention to represent individual entrepreneurs, newer digital-born brands, or are they mainly drawn from traditional brands in radio, television, or print? And are the journalists whom people are able to name mainly trading in facts or opinion?
[…]
Looking across our six countries, we see significant differences in terms of the attention paid, with stronger affinity toward news brands in Northern/Western European markets such as Finland, Germany, and the UK, but greater identification with individual journalists or commentators in Brazil and France. The United States is somewhere in the middle, with around a third paying most attention to brands and a fifth to journalists.
While respondents in the six countries are divided in the attention they pay to news brands and journalists, what I find most fascinating is that the ‘most mentioned’ names by the respondents are predominantly traditional media journalists — broadcast or print. I feel strongly against traditional media pulling out of print and especially the on-air spaces, lest podcasters, Tiktok/YouTube/Twitch streamers who fancy themselves ‘journalists’ fill that void and carve a new piece of hell.
The role of email news
Nic Newman for Reuters Institute:
Our Digital News Report data show that email newsletters remain an important channel across countries, with an average of 17% using them weekly.
[…]
Despite the increase in the supply of newsletters in the last few years, the proportion accessing them has actually fallen in many countries, in part because of increased competition from newer channels such as social media, online aggregators, and news alerts via mobile phones.
[…]
It is important to note that email news is valued mainly by older, richer, and more educated news consumers, most of whom are already deeply invested in news.
Do you feel old, rich and educated, readers?
What I read, watch, and listen to…
I’m reading Hannah Fry’s Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine.
I’m watching The Morning Show. I am only three episodes in but so far, I find it pretentious — I don’t know any journalist who keeps reminding everyone and themselves that “we are journalists,” who studied x number of years at some elite institute to earn an advanced degree in an over-saturated field of study and that is why they are honest and trustworthy and the last bastion of truth… You get the picture. It is righteous and pompous, and I’m running out of adjectives. No good journalist ever talks about themselves and their profession in this manner. It is also a very white show so that probably explains it.
I’m listening to Dato’ Seri, the Malay adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, first staged as a play, now produced as a radio drama.
More stray links:
We talked to the anal surgeon behind Postmates’ “bottom-friendly menu” by Ian Kumamoto for Mic.
On the moral responsibility to be an informed citizen by Solmu Anttila for Psyche.
CIGI’s Heidi Tworek tasks students to find a topic without a Wikipedia page and write that entry.