Richard Fletcher on the Reuters Institute's research in 2024-25

From our Annual Report 2024-25

Our research helps journalists and editors across the world to navigate a complex and changing media environment, while also addressing the questions that matter most to media and communication scholars. Our goal is to provide timely, accessible, evidence-based independent analysis of issues facing journalism and news media, published in the form of RISJ factsheets and reports, peer-reviewed journal articles, and books.

Our flagship publication is the annual Digital News Report, which explores how people get news in different countries, and how that is changing. The 2025 report covered 48 markets, adding Serbia for the first time, making it our most wide-ranging report yet. The 2025 report will also be the last with Nic Newman as lead author. Nic has worked tirelessly on the report every year since its inception in 2012, and we are very glad that he has agreed to remain part of our research team, working on our annual Trends and Predictions report alongside other RISJ projects. We are also pleased to have appointed Jim Egan, a leading industry expert on the international news media, as lead author of the Digital News Report for the 2026 report onwards.

We continue with our research work on AI and the Future of News. The research strand of the project expands our empirical research on how the news media in different parts of the world use AI, how the public engages with it, and what they think about the use of AI in news.

In the last year we published a report on UK Journalists in the 2020s, based on data collected as part of the Worlds of Journalism project. The report, which features a range of chapters from UK-based academics, provides a highly detailed description of the work of UK journalists, offering insights into the profession that complement our extensive work on news audiences.

We also published a Knight Foundation-funded report looking at how people think about online platforms and democracy in eight countries, as well as the latest in our series of reports on the audiences for climate news across the world, as part of the Oxford Climate Journalism Network. In 2025 we also published the latest editions of our Trends and Predictions report and our Women and Leadership and Race and Leadership factsheets.

A sample of our research from the last year is included on the following pages. Many RISJ publications are available for free download from our website. Hard copies can be purchased via our partner publisher, Columbia University Press, Amazon, other booksellers, or the University of Oxford online store.

More on our research:

• Explore our work
• Our research team