Journalism Today: 3 Dec 2024

By Matthew Leake, Marina Adami and Eduardo Suárez

🗞️ 3 top news stories

1. The effect of BBC’s local expansion into local news. A new report from Ofcom looks at the possible impact of BBC expansion into online local news coverage. The BBC, which is funded by a license fee paid by live television users across the country, has been cutting back on local radio and investing in online coverage for a few years. Some commercial publishers have said this damages their businesses. Ofcom’s report notices “commercial local (and non-local) online news viewing has declined” in the past few years, but doesn’t find significant evidence that this is “causally linked” to BBC new investment. | Read

• The money quote: "If there is displacement of commercial viewing to the BBC, we would expect commercial page views to drop most in local index areas where BBC local news output increases most. Our analysis did not find significant evidence of this. (...) We found no significant evidence that increased BBC local news stories are driving additional reductions in commercial local page views. [Our] analysis has not found significant evidence that the BBC’s changes have resulted in lower page views for commercial publications".

📚 From our archive. Our Senior Research Associate Rasmus Nielsen recently wrote a piece about this topic. He points to recent research from Switzerland that confirms that public service media doesn’t crowd out commercial news publishers. On the contrary, according to this research, public service news increases interest in what private publishers are offering. | Read

2. Vertical video on news sites. News websites are increasingly using vertical video on their pages, providing additional context and content, and bringing journalists even closer to their audience in a format that is popular with users and more compatible with mobile news consumption. In this new piece by Hanaa’ Tameez for Nieman Lab she speaks to journalists at leading titles including the Economist, New York Times and Washington Post about the value to both website users and publications alike. | Read

• A quote. “The point is to future-proof our brand. We want people to be able to consume our journalism how they want to consume our journalism,”  says Liv Moloney, The Economist’s head of video

📚 From our archive. 64% of media leaders that we surveyed around the world told us their organisations are planning to produce more video in 2024. Author of our yearly Trends and Predictions report, Nic Newman, wrote: “[Vertical video] will mainly be about trying to build relationships rather than making money, but in 2024 publishers will increasingly look to bring these storytelling techniques back into their own news websites and apps.” | Read

3. Newsroom diversity and gendered violence. In this week's bite-sized podcast from our Fellowship Takeaways series we look at how gender diversity in newsrooms shapes the stories that get told and ultimately impacts the broader conversation in society. Host Caithlin Mercer hears insights from Marta Caparrós and Fermín Elizari from women-led sports news site Relevo, which uncovered corruption in Spanish football, and from Rosamund Urwin, who reported sexual abuse for the Sunday Times. | Listen

• A quote. "A lot of the good reporting on this does tend to be done by women, and obviously some of them will be the victims of sexual trauma themselves. I think that can bring a level of empathy and understanding. But in all these things we’ve got to not take our own biases," says Urwin.

📚 From our archive. Women-led newsrooms across the Global South are helping to frame coverage of important issues such as climate, politics and business through a gendered or intersectional lens writes Laura Oliver in this piece on our website that hears from journalists at Brazil’s AzMina, Uganda’s HerStory, Nigeria’s BONews Service and Nepal’s Boju Bajai. “We were all frustrated with the precarity of journalism, so we decided to do something about it… We want to do investigative work and solutions journalism for women in which they can see themselves.” says AzMina’s Carolina Oms. | Read

📊 Chart of the day

📱 Paying for online news. The proportion of people paying for online news across 20 countries that we surveyed in our Digital News Report 2024 varies from just 8% and 9% in the UK and Japan, respectively, to 31% and and 40% in the Scandinavian countries of Sweden and Norway. A special chapter of our DNR looks not just at the proportion who pay for online news but also the amount they pay given the range of discounts and introductory offers. Across these same 20 markets 41% are not paying the full sticker price for their subscription. | Read

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☕Coffee break

Spain’s ruling party is suing an influential newspaper. The Spanish Socialist Party is suing digital newspaper El Confidencial, its editor and some of its journalists. The newspaper has published several investigations about the party’s effort to discredit journalists and about the business dealings of the Spanish Prime Minister’s wife, which the government hasn’t denied. The lawsuit asks El Confidential for €150,000 in compensation. | Read

Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter is the latest major media outlet to leave X. DN, which leans to the political left and is one of the most respected dailies in Sweden, will join the UK’s Guardian and Spain’s Vanguardia in no longer publishing its articles on the platform. DN cited X owner Elon Musk’s political involvement with US president-elect Donald Trump in its decision. | Read

Media in the US and beyond looks set for a year of renewed interest and investment, Semafor’s Max Tani writes. Several trends converging mean the media outlook may change both at the corporate level, where Trump’s administration looks likely to be friendlier of big mergers and at the content level with the continued rise of YouTube and podcasting. | Read

A British freelance journalist is raising money to revive local news in a London borough. Rob McGibbon launched a fundraising campaign to start a new local title in his neighbourhood, The Chelsea Citizen. Despite being one of the wealthiest parts of the country, Chelsea has not been covered by local news since the closure of the local paper in 2017. | Read

Media analyst Thomas Baekdal created a custom GPT that ranks articles’ relevance. The AI tool extracts metadata from a link the user posts in the chat and applies different frameworks to evaluate its regional and personal relevance to the audience. | Read

Five practices to advance community-centred journalism. Journalism professor Damian Radcliffe summarised key takeaways from a recent report he authored in this blog post. | Read

📚 One piece from our archive

♞ The challenges of freelancing. Low pay, struggles with mental health and the delicate balance between doing something you love versus ensuring career viability, are just some of the struggles that freelance journalists around the world endure. Gretel Kahn heard from 25 freelancers in 20 countries about how they navigate them. “The passion trap is this profession you really want and all the sacrifices you’re willing to make to be part of it,” one French freelancer told Gretel. “For a while, it will be great and you’ll be fulfilled by your job, but after a while you’ll realise that your work won’t love you back.” | Read

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