This is the tenth edition of our Digital News Report and a milestone for us in that the 46 markets covered this year account for more than half the world’s population. We are particularly proud to be able to include more countries in the Global South, primarily because we hope the data and analysis we present are useful for journalists, editors, and media executives there, but also because we strongly believe their colleagues elsewhere can learn a lot from the situation in countries where news media have long faced political attacks, financial precarity, and internet users heavily oriented towards mobile and social media – some of the realities journalists in historically more privileged parts of the world increasingly have to deal with.
Our findings this year show how, if anything, the Coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated many of the long-term trends we have documented over the past decade, especially the move to a more digital, mobile, and platform-dominated media environment. Developments this year put further pressure on the business models of many traditional media, but have also reminded at least parts of the public of the importance and value of trustworthy news from independent news organisations.
This year’s survey finds evidence that some brands have benefited from a desire for reliable information around the pandemic – both in terms of higher reach, higher trust, and more paying subscribers. While the effects are uneven, do not apply to all brands or all countries, and may not last after the crisis is over, these are positive findings from publishers’ point of view.
Our analysis also shows how the role of different platforms is evolving. We document the roles played by mainstream news organisations, individual journalists, and other voices on different social media, the continuing move to closed messaging apps and more visual social media, as well as the continued widespread public concern over false or misleading information – especially Facebook and Facebook-owned messaging applications including WhatsApp.
Amid deep divisions within many societies over politics and social justice, we ask searching questions about what people expect from their news and examine attitudes to traditional notions of journalistic impartiality and objectivity. We also explore how fairly the media are seen as treating different groups including women, young people, and ethnic minorities.
And our report continues to document the economic impact of digital disruption which has been intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic (even as platform companies including Google and Facebook reported significant growth last year). Given the financial challenges the business of news faces, we explore public attitudes to whether the government should step in to support commercial media – but find little appetite for this.
Our survey this year covered 46 markets, including 24 in Europe, and six in Latin America where we have added Colombia and Peru. In Asia we have added India, Indonesia, and Thailand to our existing eight markets, and in Africa we are delighted to include Nigeria for the first time, following the inclusion of Kenya in 2020 and South Africa in 2019.
Because we use online polling, we continue to focus on countries with high internet penetration and which are either broadly democratic or generally compare themselves to countries with a democratic tradition. Even so, the increasing number and diversity of markets covered have led us to compare fewer data points across the whole sample and to focus on meaningful comparisons across markets that are broadly similar. We’ve provided more detail about differences in polling samples in both the methodology pages and the relevant country pages.
This report continues to benefit from a strong network of partners and sponsors around the world. We are proud to have the opportunity to work with a number of leading academics, as well as media experts from the news industry. Our partners have helped in a variety of different ways, checking questionnaires, helping with interpretation, and often publishing their own reports.
Given the richness of the research, this report can only convey a small part of the data and analysis. More detail is available on our website https://www.digitalnewsreport.org/2021 which contains slidepacks and charts, along with a licence that encourages reuse, subject to attribution.
Making all this possible, we are hugely grateful to our sponsors: the Google News Initiative, BBC News, Ofcom, the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, the Dutch Media Authority (CvdM), the Media Industry Research Foundation of Finland, the Fritt Ord Foundation in Norway, the Korea Press Foundation, and Edelman UK, as well as our academic sponsors at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research/Hans Bredow Institute, Hamburg, the University of Navarra, the University of Canberra, the Centre d’études sur les médias, Quebec, Canada, and Roskilde University in Denmark. The Open Society Foundations has played a key role in helping us to expand the report to cover more countries in the Global South over the last few years, as has Google’s commitment to a three-year extension of their support for the report. This year Fundación Gabo has joined the project, and we are delighted they are supporting the translation of the report into Spanish.