Overview and key findings of the 2024 Digital News Report
This year’s report comes at a time when around half the world’s population have been going to the polls in national and regional elections, and as wars continue to rage in Ukraine and Gaza.
In these troubled times, a supply of accurate, independent journalism remains more important than ever, and yet in many of the countries covered in our survey we find the news media increasingly challenged by rising mis- and disinformation, low trust, attacks by politicians, and an uncertain business environment.
Our country pages this year are filled with examples of layoffs, closures, and other cuts due to a combination of rising costs, falling advertising revenues, and sharp declines in traffic from social media. In some parts of the world these economic challenges have made it even harder for news media to resist pressures from powerful businesspeople or governments looking to influence coverage and control narratives.
There is no single cause for this crisis; it has been building for some time, but many of the immediate challenges are compounded by the power and changing strategies of rival big tech companies, including social media, search engines, and video platforms.
Some are now explicitly deprioritising news and political content, while others have switched focus from publishers to ‘creators’, and pushing more fun and engaging formats – including video – to keep more attention within their own platforms.
These private companies do not have any obligations to the news, but with many people now getting much of their information via these competing platforms, these shifts have consequences not only for the news industry, but also our societies.
As if this were not enough, rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are about to set in motion a further series of changes including AI-driven search interfaces and chatbots that could further reduce traffic flows to news websites and apps, adding further uncertainty to how information environments might look in a few years.
Our report this year documents the scale and impact of these ‘platform resets’. With TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube on the rise, we look at why consumers are embracing more video consumption and investigate which mainstream and alternative accounts – including creators and influencers – are getting most attention when it comes to news.
We also explore the very different levels of confidence people have in their ability to distinguish between trustworthy and untrustworthy content on a range of popular third-party platforms around the world.
For the first time in our survey, we also take a detailed look at consumer attitudes towards the use of AI in the news, supported by qualitative research in three countries (the UK, US and Mexico).
As publishers rapidly adopt AI, to make their businesses more efficient and to personalise content, our research suggests they need to proceed with caution, as the public generally wants humans in the driving seat at all times.
With publishers struggling to connect with much of the public, and growing numbers of people selectively (and in some cases continuously) avoiding the news, we have also explored different user needs to understand where the biggest gaps lie between what audiences want and what publishers currently provide. And we look at the price that some consumers are currently paying for online news and what might entice more people to join them.
