A note from the Reuters Institute's Chair, Helen Boaden

From our Annual Report 2024-25

It’s an honour and a pleasure to be stepping into the role of Chair of the Reuters Institute’s Steering Committee.

Thanks to the ambition and vision of my predecessor, Alan Rusbridger, I have inherited a clever, curious, and committed Committee as well as a highly energetic and inventive team superbly led by Mitali Mukherjee. I am grateful for the warm welcome I’ve received from Head of the Department of Politics and International Relations David Doyle and from the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s CEO Antonio Zappulla, and for their solid support in ensuring the financial and institutional stability of our organisation.

Together we have exciting if challenging work ahead. When I was a novice reporter, a brilliant investigator on the BBC’s Panorama programme told me, ‘You have to report the world as it is, Helen, not as you would like it to be.’

And that just about sums up our mission at the Reuters Institute. We have an intrinsic commitment to delivering original, contextualised, and well-tested evidence on subjects which matter in journalism, however uncomfortable or difficult the implications turn out to be. We appreciate that solutions to the many problems facing the profession can only come from a clear-eyed understanding of the challenges and from sharing what we have learned.

So we are not seduced by the idea of a lost golden age of journalism. Many of our Fellows come from countries and political cultures where the very idea of independent, evidence-based journalism has always been under the cosh. The rest of us have much to learn from their survival strategies.

Now we face the complexity of the evolving media world and understand very deeply how news and information are constantly being reshaped by technology, ownership, and politics. It’s hardly a new problem: in the 1920s, the founder of the BBC, John Reith, acutely aware of the propaganda possibilities of the new mass medium of radio, argued for an independently funded news organisation to protect journalism from ‘Force and Money – unfortunately the only two unfailing powers’.

At the Reuters Institute our Fellows dig deep into the various impacts of Force and Money as well as cutting-edge technology. A recent project by our Brazilian Fellow Carla Miranda, for example, exposed the impact that generative AI is having on newsrooms and revealed the knowledge assets they need to survive. It is this kind of work which will enable newsroom leaders to think through their strategies and educate their teams for the next tsunami of change.

We may be modest in size but our work has the power to make a difference. Thank you for supporting us.