TUESDAY 14 SEPTEMBER 2021

In this newsletter you'll find our new report on trust in news, based on original survey data from Brazil, India, the UK and the US. You'll also find a new paper on newsroom metrics from one of our Journalist Fellows, a chart and a podcast episode from this year's Digital News Report, details to apply to our next online leadership programme and our usual selection of readings and online events.  

🕒 This newsletter is 1,499 words, a 12-minute read. If you don't receive this newsletter yet, join our mailing list here.

Our research. On Thursday we published a report on the factors contributing to trust in news around the world. Authored by Benjamin Toff, Sumitra Badrinathan, Camila Mont'Alverne, Amy Ross Arguedas, Richard Fletcher and Rasmus Nielsen, the report is the latest instalment from our Trust in News Project and is based on original survey data from four countries: Brazil, India, the UK and the US. Here are five findings: 

🎯 The real issue. Indifference, not hostility, is the primary challenge for journalists when faced with the task of increasing trust in news. People who lack trust in news are not the most vocal critics but often the least knowledgeable about journalism.

👎 Who are the untrusting. Our data shows that the 'generally untrusting' towards news tend to be older, less educated, less interested in politics and less connected to urban centres. In India and the UK, those who evaluated Narendra Modi or Boris Johnson favourably were much more likely to be generally trusting towards news. This dynamic was reversed in Brazil and the US, where positive evaluations of Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump were associated with the untrusting instead. 

🧐 Different sources, different trust levels. People are often more trusting of sources they use and less so of those they do not. Levels of trust are much lower for specific news brands. Even a highly trusted news source as the BBC has slightly lower figures (75%) if we compare it with information in the news overall (78%). 

🤨 Negative views. Many people hold cynical views about how journalists do their jobs. In Brazil, for example, 78% think journalists often try to cover up mistakes, 36% think they often accept payments from sources and 35% think they often allow opinions to influence coverage. 

🤷‍♀️ A remarkable indifference. The least trusting towards news are more indifferent about how journalism is practised. As the chart above shows, our data shows that factors involving editorial practices such as transparency about how news is produced are deemed less important to people who are generally untrusting toward news.

📱 Read the report here 
📄 Download a PDF version here 
🇪🇸 Read summaries in Spanish and Portuguese
🧶 Check out a thread with more charts here

🙋🏾‍♀️Fewer than 6% of editors-in-chief at 73 award-winning US college newspapers are Black. | 💸Worker-owned sports and culture website Defector.com generated revenues of $3.2 million in its first year, mostly from its 40,000 subscribers. | 👩‍🌾 A news consortium with more than 50 member newsrooms aims to cover the most pressing issues facing rural America and to highlight some possible solutions. | 🍹 Digital media company Dotdash, which is on track to bring in well over $250 million in revenue in 2022, is launching its first-ever standalone store pegged to its site Liquor.com. | ✍️ Spanish long-form digital magazine Revista 5W has reached 4,400 subscribers this year. Subscriptions bring in around 75% of the revenue, according to the outlet's annual results. 

The programme. On 28-29 September we’ll host an online edition of our Future Leaders in News course for new and mid-career editors and newsroom managers. The programme is interactive and you’ll get to share learnings and experiences with peers from other news organisations in a safe, off-the-record setting, in order to help you address any practical challenge you encounter in your management work.

🙋🏿‍♀️ How to apply. If you’ve recently assumed a news leadership role or you are an editor or newsroom manager with up to 5 years' experience, email federica.cherubini@politics.ox.ac.uk

The rise of TikTok for news. Almost a third of 18-24-year-olds (31%) report using TikTok for any purpose, with 9% using it for news, according to our Digital News Report 2021. In order to target younger, harder-to-reach news audiences, news outlets are experimenting on the platform, with notable creators including the Washington Post’s Dave Jorgenson and Vice News journalist Sophia-Smith Galer. | Learn more

Explore Digital News Report 2021

🔗 Read the executive summary of the report. | By Nic Newman
✊🏿 How people perceive news coverage. | By Richard Fletcher 
⚖️ What audiences think about impartiality. | By Craig T. Robertson
🏡 How technology has disrupted local news. | By Anne Schulz
💰 Financing commercial news media. | By R. Fletcher and R. Nielsen
🕺🏻 How and why people use social media for news. | By Simge Andı 

📈 Explore data from your country. Figures from 46 markets
🌎 Read the report in Spanish. Explore the report in this global language
📄 Download the PDF version and read it on your tablet 
📊 Check out our interactive. Explore our data and build your own charts
👩‍🔬 Learn about our methodology. How we produce the report

🎙 Listen to our podcast series on the report 
🎥 Watch a video summary. Explore the key findings in 2 minutes
👩🏾‍💻 Explore the report in 192 slides. A presentation to use in your class

"One of the clearest fault lines is people’s perceptions of news coverage of their political views. Political partisans are more likely to think that the news media covers their views unfairly. That’s particularly true with those in the right"

Richard Fletcher
Co-author of the Digital News Report
Audio and transcript here
Listen on: Spotify | Apple | Google

The presentations. Reuters Institute researchers are presenting papers at this year's virtual conference of the International Journal of Press/Politics. The topics covered by the research include incidental exposure to news, what people mean when they express preference for impartial news, and the role of partisanship when it comes to trust in news.

The project. How can editors use metrics more efficiently in their daily work? This is the question at the heart of a new paper from our Journalist Fellow Elisabeth Gamperl, pictured here, who is the managing editor of Süddeutsche Zeitung's digital storytelling unit. "It is not just about identifying the right metrics, but also about managing to weave the work with metrics into our daily routines," she writes. 

The paper. The paper is based on interviews with experts from several newsrooms and includes many useful lessons. “Metrics are a vehicle for cultural change through which you can make journalists behave differently. I want the newsroom to believe that these numbers can help them improve their journalism," says Chris Moran, Head of Editorial Innovation at the Guardian and one of the interviewees of the project.

📱 Read a short piece on the project here
📃 Download Elisabeth's paper here 

With press freedom under threat... we are doing all we can to help journalists fight back. Our new fund brings journalists working in difficult environments on to our signature Fellowship Programme so they can build the networks, skills and knowledge they need. Please donate any amount you can from £25 to the fund so more journalists under pressure can spend time with us.

🌍 Wednesday 15 September, 14:00 UK time. Leading fact-checkers from across Africa discuss efforts to counter misinformation during COVID-19. Speakers include Ann Ngengere from Viral Facts, Rabiu Alhassan from GhanaFact, and Rose Lukalo and Enock Nyariki from PesaCheck. | Code For Africa

🗓 15-17 September. The International Press Institute holds its annual congress both in person in Vienna and online. Speakers include Rappler CEO Maria Ressa, Dean of Columbia Journalism School Steve Coll and Executive Editor of Scroll.in Supriya Sharma. | IPI

WE ARE READING...

📸 Photographing 9/11. "I remember a cop asking me: 'How can you take photographs?' I told him: 'I have to document this. It’s history.'" Read AP photographer Gulnara Samoilova’s poignant testimony on how she bore witness to the tragedy of 9/11. | The Guardian

🇬🇧 Islamophobia and COVID-19. A study of how Muslims were portrayed in the UK press during the first wave of COVID-19 found "the news media looking to reassert hegemonic understandings of race, migration, and welfare" through 'massification', moral panic, and a framing of 'good' and ‘bad' Muslims. | LSE British Politics and Policy

💉 Journalism and burnout. An important piece by prominent media blogger Adam Tinworth on how burnout eats badly into journalists’ productivity and create a vicious circle in which "fewer resources means more stress, which means more burn out, which means lower productivity, which means more stress." | One Man & His Blog 

🚨 Press freedom in Kashmir. “Now that Kashmir’s freelance journalists are almost the only reporters conveying the situation on the ground, these raids are being seen as yet another assault on press freedom,” writes Rayan Naqash after four journalists’ homes were raided, their belongings confiscated, and they were detained at a police station. | Newslaundry

More information on what we do...

Today's email was written by Eduardo Suárez and Matthew Leake.