My digest of the 2022 Digital News Report
The Reuters Institute at Oxford has lots of insights for media-watchers
If last week was spoiled for you by the absence of your regular Future Proof start-of-the-week newsletter, then I’d like to apologise. I was on holiday, blissfully learning nothing about Italy’s media output (other than that one of their biggest selling weekly magazines is the news translated through the medium of crosswords).
In my absence, the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford published its digital news report for 2022, which you can read here. The Reuters Institute is one of the few places (outside of this newsletter) doing serious media analysis in the UK. It’s well-funded and able to poll on a global scale, which often throws up interesting data. For their global digital news report, they canvas a vast array of countries using a uniform sample size of about 2,000 participants (closer to 2.5k in the UK, for some reason) which gives a broad, if not comprehensive, response.
Whatever; data geeks can stress out about methodology. I’m going to quickly run you through a handful of the findings from the report that I think are particularly interesting or valuable from the perspective of digital media entrepreneurship and innovation. First up:
The UK and the USA are experiencing a significant decline in ‘interest in news’. Over the past 5 to 10 years, the US has seen a slump of about 20% while the UK has seen a fall of closer to 30% in the same period. The Reuters report calls this the Trump Bump vs the Biden Slump, but I suspect there’s also a sense of fatigue here. You know the old joke about fancy restaurants (“the food is terrible”, “I know! And such small portions…”) well, you could almost say the same, but inverted, of the news. The news is terrible, and there’s so damn much of it. Interestingly, while the UK and the USA are among the worst hit over this time period, the countries least affected by news fatigue are the northern European ones: Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Netherlands and Finland. I think this reinforces my suspicion: over the past 10 years, they’ve had less bad/fractious news to be put off by (and Germany is starting to decline more rapidly, so watch this space).
Next up, the report looks at paying for news, something that nerds apparently do. And basically, their report is very glum. Only Sweden, Australia and Germany report increased participation in paid news. Everyone else is on a plateau. I suppose it’s good that we haven’t seen a decline, though the 2023 report will be the real test as the cost of living crisis (and the general end of covid restrictions) put pressures on the market. The report also suggests that, among people who pay for news, only 7% of Americans subscribe to a newsletter (like this one, you lucky blighters) and that figure is lower everywhere else (down to just 1% in Germany). Newsletters might not be the future, as I’ve been telling podcast clients for years…
Everyone who reads my blogs or newsletters knows that I’m fascinated by YouTube, a phenomenon that I’m about 5 years too old to properly understand. But it’s clear to me that YouTube is becoming a huge resource for media consumption, even if ‘news’ isn’t its obvious strength. In the Philippines, 57% of people consume news via YouTube, whereas only 9% do in the UK (making it among the lowest consumers). In point of fact, there seems to be a clear separation in terms of the countries using YouTube and those not using it. YouTube is strong where in countries with lower GDP and lack of media plurality (Philippines, Thailand, India) and weak in rich countries with established media traditions (Denmark, UK, Finland). Clearly this also reflects, to some extent, the agnosticism of Western youth with the very idea of news.
Podcast usage is up everywhere, yay (except Italy, France and Australia, but who cares about them). The UK still lags behind everyone else in the Reuters sample for news podcast consumption (25%) while our neighbours across the Irish sea lead the way (46%). Intriguingly, while we’re on the podcast results from the report, the platforms report for the UK looks like this: Spotify leads with 30%, BBC Sounds second with 27% and Apple Podcasts takes bronze with 20% (others listed are YouTube 14%, Audible 8% and Google Podcasts 8%). This is – I’m not going to mince my words – wrong. All the data I’ve ever seen disagrees with these findings, not to mention simple anecdotal evidence. The idea that more people in the UK are using the dreadful BBC Sounds app than Apple Podcasts is deranged – not to mention the idea that 8% of people are using Google Podcasts!
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