Journalism Today. 6 Jan 2025

By Eduardo Suárez and Matthew Leake

🗞️ 3 top news stories

1. How to make 2025 your year of learning. The usual newsroom hamster wheel often crowds out opportunities for fresh ideas. So, how can newsroom leaders stay open to learning? Our Senior Research Associate Lucy Kueng shares five principles that can help leaders prioritise professional growth, challenge their own assumptions, and create a culture of learning. The first principle is making learning a true priority. How? In three ways:

• Be consistent: Learning compounds over time. Make it a habit, and it can be transformative. 
• Be strategic: Focus on what you need or want to learn right now. Dive deeply into it, nail it to where you need to get it, and then move on. 
• Keep it light touch: Learning should energise, not overwhelm. Start with accessible resources, then move to more complex materials. Break it into chunks: Even 20 minutes a day can bring real progress when done consistently. | Read the piece in full

📚If you truly want to make 2025 your year of learning… you should consider joining one of one leadership programmes in the year ahead. You’ll find everything you need to know in this link.

2. News for young people by young people. Young people are an elusive audience many news outlets are vying for. A new generation of news startups is trying to change this, with a more informal tone and a focus on explainers and online formats. One of these outlets is Watif, a new Spanish startup focused on Substack-based newsletters and video podcasts. Our own Marina Adami spoke to Watif’s product director Mar Manrique for a piece on this innovative site. In the article she discusses how Watif aims to be different and how it plans to appeal to young people. | Read

• A key quote: "When we choose the topics that we are covering, it's important to put ourselves in the user’s shoes. It must be something we are curious about, something we want to understand. We are in a very uncertain moment. No one knows what is going to happen, but we have to make decisions, and it's hard. So having this new outlet that covers the future is something that we didn't see in the Spanish media landscape," says Manrique.

📚From our archive. Read this chapter by our colleague Kirsten Eddy on the changing habits and attitudes of young audiences towards the news that we published as part of the Digital News Report 2022. You can also explore this piece of qualitative research on the same issue from our friends at Craft our read our pieces on other projects focusing on young audiences: Will Media | The News Movement | TOPO | Relevo

3. A cartoonist quits in protest. The Washington Post’s cartoonist Ann Telnaes announced she was resigning after the newspaper rejected a cartoon depicting the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, genuflecting toward a statue of Donald Trump. The newspaper’s opinions editor, David Shipley, said that he disagreed with Telnaes’ “interpretation of events.” "As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable,” Telnaes wrote in a piece explaining her decision. “For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job." | Read Telnaes’ piece

• If you want to know more… listen to this audio piece in which Telnaes explains her decision to NPR reporter David Folkenflik. Fellow cartoonist Barry Blitt published this cartoon as a tribute to her stance.

More trouble ahead. The Post will be facing dozens of layoffs later this week, according to this piece by media reporter Oliver Darcy. The newspaper already cut around 240 layoffs in October 2023 and is still looking for a permanent editor-in-chief after the person chosen by publisher Will Lewis, British Journalist Robert Winnett, decided not to take the role.    

📊 Chart of the day

Direct news access by age. For over-35s in the UK, the proportion who access online news via a news website or app has remained stable over the past 10 years, according to our Digital News Report 2024. But the proportion of younger generations doing so has declined significantly resulting in a generational gap in news consumption patterns. | Read

_________

☕ Coffee break

The body of Indian freelance journalist Mukesh Chandrakar, who went missing on New Year’s Day, has been found in a septic tank in Chhattisgarh state. Chandrakar had reported on alleged corruption. | Read

Shatha al-Sabbagh, a journalism student in the West Bank, has been shot dead in an attack by Palestinian Authority forces conducting operations against militant groups in the territory. | Read

Journalists at American Jewish news outlets tell Jacob Nelson about the “intense pressure when making the everyday decisions that go into reporting and editing,” and the changes in their audience and community since 7 Oct 2023. | Read

Vogue Editor Anna Wintour is among the recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the US. | Read

Incidents of harassment against journalists in the Netherlands were up in 2024 compared to previous years. 249 incidents were reported last year, up from 218 in 2023 and 198 in 2022. | Read

_________

Are you our next Director? The University of Oxford is seeking a new Director of the Reuters Institute. They will have the strategic vision, academic credentials and public engagement skills to ensure the Reuters Institute continues to thrive. Applications close Friday 17 January, 17.00 UK time. | Find out more and how to apply

_________

📚 One piece from our archive

How two Argentinian newspapers managed to get hundreds of thousands of digital subscribers. Two Argentinian newspapers have managed to achieve significant subscriber growth despite the country undergoing significant economic turmoil. Newspaper Clarín claims to have over 700,000 paid subscribers while its main competitor, La Nación, has reported more than 375,000 digital paid subscribers. Our colleague Gretel Kahn spoke to executives at the papers about their approach to boosting subscriptions. “Every day we test millions of things and most of them don't work. But we are proud of that because it means that we are testing. If we don't test, we can't move forward,” said Javier Kraviez, Clarín’s Chief Digital Officer. | Read the piece · Lee en español

_________

The Reuters Institute has more than 16,000 followers on Bluesky. If you don't follow us yet, please do so by clicking on this link.

_________

📬 Sign up for our newsletter now

Sign up for the Reuters Institute's newsletter to ensure you get everything we do. Original reporting, evidence-based insights, online seminars and readings are sent twice a week. | Sign up now