The Reuters Institute published its latest annual report on the state of the news industry last week, revealing that audience trust in news media continues to slide.
The UK-based think tank’s 160-page Digital News Report 2023 report (PDF download) — built on data mined from surveys of around 93,000 individuals from across 46 markets — notes that trust in the news fell by 2 percentage points this past year, with just 40% of respondents saying they “trust most news most of the time”.
The reasons for this lack of trust range from mounting criticism of the news media to greater polarization within public discourse.
When reading the report, however, the thing that kept popping up at me was the apparent lack of audience enthusiasm for news. The stats not only show a lack of trust in news but also a growing apathy to it.
The Reuters Institute found that just 48% of its aggregate sample were very or extremely interested in news, down from 63% in 2017. At the same time, only 22% of respondents were actively participating with the news, while 47% didn’t participate at all.
In the report’s foreword, Reuters Institute director Rasmus Kleis Nielsen made an interesting point that people’s “platform preferences rarely regress”. Nielsen likened this to people in the 1980s unlikely to trade in their mobiles for landline phones upon buying their first home.
The argument is that as the tide of technology rises it lifts all boats. This applies as much to news platforms as it does to mobile phones.
Nielsen said: “There are no reasonable grounds for expecting that those born in the 2000s will suddenly come to prefer old-fashioned websites, let alone broadcast and print, simply because they grow older.”
His comments made me think of deputy editor-in-chief of Swedish daily Aftonbladet, Martin Schori, who argued some weeks ago that many publishers are stuck making online newspapers.
While there are many steps publishers have to take in order to build trust with their audiences, the first step is to engage them in order to build a relationship with them. If audiences aren’t engaged by the news, why will they care if its publisher is trustworthy or not?
Interestingly, while those surveyed expressed concerns over how algorithms surfaced news stories in their feeds, content recommendation engines were the preferred choice over human curation. In the end, these engines know their audiences better than the audiences know themselves.
TikTok’s growing importance as a news source has been widely documented in recent years, not least of which by the Reuters Institute itself. The think tank noted this year that that social media platform reaches 44% of 18-24 year olds across markets and 20% for news.
But it isn’t just TikTok that publishers should worry about. The Reuters Institute noted that 30% of those surveyed relied on social media for news, compared with the 22% that relied on direct access to websites or an app. An almost mirrored reversal of fortunes from five years ago.
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Source: Digital News Report 2023
The news media has long talked about rebuilding trust, but the approach of the industry at large appears to be missing the mark. It’s not enough to advocate a service’s merits, when the audience’s interest in that service is eroded.
Reinvention is difficult, but publishers that hold fast to the creation of digital newspapers may find themselves without an audience willing to listen to arguments of trustworthiness.
