The shift to social media: Increasing pressures on news media amid falling revenues
The Reuters Institute 2024 Digital News Report reveals declining global news interest, rising selective avoidance, and challenges from social media
In the week before the launch of the 2024 edition of the Reuters Digital News Report (DNR) on 17 June, there were two announcements of significant media upheaval in Kenya and South Africa.
In Kenya, the Nation Media Group announced it was laying off 180 employees, including senior editors. According to Business Today, the media group, “reeling from a Sh205.7 million loss in 2023, appears to have decided to make more painful cuts to save costs and save itself from sinking further into the red. Already, Bernard Mwinzi, a senior editor of the Nation newspaper division, has announced his exit from Nation Centre effective 14 June, while two more senior editors are expected to follow suit.”
In South Africa, Moneyweb reported that publishing giant Media24 is gearing up to close several of its mainstream print publications, including City Press, Rapport, Beeld, and Daily Sun. It is unclear whether these titles will continue as standalone digital titles.
This erosion of the media landscape speaks directly to some of the findings in the 2024 DNR. According to the Reuters Institute director and editor Rasmus Nielsen, “The public is increasingly relying on competing platforms to access all sorts of content and information. Many of these platforms are in turn increasingly moving away from news and publishers, and instead focusing more on other kinds of content and other creators. This more complicated platform ecosystem, the end of mass referrals from legacy social media, and growing competition for attention means journalists and publishers will have to work much, much harder to earn the public’s attention, let alone convince them to pay for news.”
The news industry is indeed in a difficult place in most of the world. In terms of subscription models, which many news houses have looked at as a way of alleviating the loss of print sales and decline in advertising revenue, the Reuters data show little growth in news subscriptions, “with just 17% saying they paid for any online news in the last year, across a basket of 20 richer countries. Northern European countries such as Norway (40%) and Sweden (31%) have the highest proportion of those paying, with Japan (9%) and the United Kingdom (8%) amongst the lowest. In some countries we find evidence of heavy discounting, with around four in ten (41%) saying they currently pay less than the full price. The US is amongst those countries where a significant proportion appear to be paying a very small amount (often just a few dollars), with many likely to be on low-price trials. By contrast, in Nordic countries we find fewer people paying a discounted rate.”
If we drill down to the four African countries in the research (Code for Africa funds the reports for Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria and South Africa), we see a varied picture in terms of news subscriptions.
According to the Kenya report, “Few people are prepared to pay for online news in Kenya, but the Nation has been tightening its paywall after briefly dropping it during the recent elections. The paper operates a freemium model with generic news for free but with some opinion pieces by popular writers now behind the paywall.”
In Morocco, “[the] online subscription model is still nascent, with the vast majority of publications free at the point of access and big online outlets such as Hespress relying on online advertising as their prime source of revenue.”
In Nigeria, “as businesses cut advertising budgets, several publishers, including THISDAY, The Guardian, and Vanguard, have introduced subscription models for their e-paper editions, but with charges as low as $0.30 per week revenue is limited and the exact number of subscribers remains undisclosed.”
“Top South African digital news site News24 reported in January 2024 that they had broken the 100,000-subscriber mark, making it the largest news website in Africa in terms of paid subscriptions. The independent Daily Maverick has grown its paid membership base to 27,500. Other news organisations are less open about their subscription figures,” the report states.
The Reuters DNR reveals, however, that “legacy social media such as Facebook and X have been actively reducing the prominence and role of news on their platforms and investing more in creator content, while video formats and networks are becoming more popular. In a year that sees a record number of elections around the globe, concern about misinformation has risen further with worries about AI-generated content a contributory factor. As publishers adopt AI to make their businesses more efficient and relevant, our research suggests they need to proceed with caution, as the public mostly wants humans to stay firmly in charge, especially when it comes to hard news topics such as politics. Meanwhile, trust in the news remains low and selective news avoidance has risen again, against a backdrop of continuing conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine.”
The report also finds that, “In many countries, we find a further decline in the use of Facebook for news, and a growing reliance on a range of alternatives including messaging apps and video networks. Facebook news consumption (37%) is down 4 percentage points across all countries in the last year; a decline that is higher in countries such as the Philippines (-11 points), Argentina (-11) and Colombia (-10). YouTube is used for news by almost 31% of our global sample each week and WhatsApp by around a fifth (21%). TikTok (13%) has overtaken X (10%) for the first time with much higher usage in parts of the Global South. The numbers in the chart below are slightly different as they reflect average data for 12 countries we have been following for ten years, but they show the same trends.”
Research also shows that, especially with younger demographics, video is becoming a more important source of online news. Short news videos are accessed by 66% of the report’s global sample each week, with longer formats attracting around half (51%). But the main focus of news video consumption is online platforms (72%) rather than publisher websites (22%), increasing the challenges around monetisation.
And if traditional news producers didn’t have enough problems, the Reuters research also finds that “users of TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat tend to pay more attention to social media influencers and celebrities than they do to journalists or media companies when it comes to news topics. This is in contrast to legacy social networks such as Facebook and Twitter/X, where news organisations still attract most attention and lead conversations.”
Trust in news is always an important metric, both for understanding the relative health of the relationship between news organisations and their audiences, but also as an indicator of the impact of misinformation on the information ecosystem. According to the report, concerns about the extent of unreliable content are widespread. “Concern about what is real and what is fake on the internet when it comes to online news has risen by 3 percentage points in the last year with around six in ten (59%) saying they are concerned. The figure is considerably higher in South Africa (81%) and the United States (72%), both countries that have been holding elections this year.”
Across markets, the proportion of respondents that say they are worried about what is real and what is fake on the internet overall is up 3pp from 56% to 59%. “It is highest in some of the countries holding polls this year, including South Africa (81%), the United States (72%), and the UK (70%).” Taking a regional view, the report finds the highest levels of concern in Africa (75%), and lower levels in much of Northern and Western Europe.
The report also finds that worries about how to distinguish between trustworthy and untrustworthy content online differs between platforms. For example, “in online platforms it is highest for TikTok and X when compared with other networks. Both platforms have hosted misinformation or conspiracies around stories such as the war in Gaza, and the Princess of Wales’s health. Qualitative research in the UK, US, and Mexico suggests growing concern about AI generated ‘photo-realistic’ pictures and so-called deepfake videos.”
AI is an area of concern for news audiences and news producers alike. “As publishers embrace the use of AI, we find widespread public suspicion about how it might be used, especially for ‘hard’ news stories such as politics or war. There is more comfort with the use of AI in behind-the-scenes tasks such as transcription and translation; in supporting rather than replacing journalists. Respondents in the United States are significantly more comfortable about different uses of AI than those living in Europe, perhaps reflecting different attitudes to regulation of mainly US-based tech companies.” According to lead researcher Richard Fletcher, “People are generally quite wary of generative AI being used for news, but they are a little more comfortable with it being used for coverage of topics like sports and entertainment, and to help with more routine behind-the-scenes tasks.”
The press release accompanying the report also highlights the issues of interest in news, news avoidance, and what audiences need. “Elections have increased interest in the news in a few countries, including the United States (52%, +3 points from last year), but the overall trend remains downward. Interest in news in Argentina, for example, has fallen from 77% in 2017 to 45% today. In the United Kingdom (38%), interest in news has almost halved since 2015.”
The report finds “a rise in selective news avoidance. Around four in ten (39%) now say they sometimes or often avoid the news — up 3 percentage points on last year’s average — with more significant increases in Brazil, Spain, Germany, and Finland. Open comments suggest that the intractable conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East may have had some impact.” And in “exploring user needs around news, our data suggest that publishers may be focusing too much on updating people on top news stories and not enough providing different perspectives on issues or reporting stories that can provide a basis for occasional optimism. In terms of topics, we find that audiences feel mostly well served by political and sports news but there are gaps around local news in some countries, as well as health and education news.”
The 2024’s Reuters Institute Digital News Report is the13th edition and it is based on an online survey of almost 100,000 people in 47 countries, representing the views of more than half the world’s population. It provides an evidence-based analysis of the pressure the digital news industry is experiencing, from ongoing ‘platform resets’ which are putting more pressure on publisher business models, to the potentially disruptive effect on the news ecosystem of advances in generative artificial intelligence.
Outgoing director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Professor Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, highlights the importance of the report to news organisations. “Research documenting these challenges can make for uncomfortable reading, but also provides necessary evidence and insight to help those in journalism and the news industry who are willing to contemplate the need for change to re-engage the wider public — as the Danish publisher Lea Korsgaard has put it, ‘People don’t miss journalism. But journalism miss people.’” The Reuters DNR 2024 provides ample information that can help news organisations work toward strategies that keep them relevant in the future, both foreseeable and unforeseeable.
The 2024 Reuters Digital News Reports for Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria and South Africa are funded by Code for Africa.
Code for Africa (CfA) is the continent’s largest network of civic technology and data journalism labs, with teams in 21 countries. CfA builds digital democracy solutions that give citizens unfettered access to actionable information that empowers them to make informed decisions and strengthens civic engagement for improved public governance and accountability. This includes building infrastructure like the continent’s largest open data portals at openAFRICA and sourceAFRICA. CfA incubates initiatives as diverse as the africanDRONE network, the PesaCheck fact-checking initiative, the sensors.AFRICA air quality sensor network, and the research and analysis programme CivicSignal.
CfA also manages the African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR), which provides the continent’s best muckraking newsrooms with the newest possible forensic data tools, digital security, and whistleblower encryption to help to improve their ability to tackle crooked politicians, organised crime, and predatory big business. CfA also runs one of Africa’s largest skills development initiatives for digital journalists, and seed funds cross-border collaboration.
