We were only a few days into Donald Trump’s presidency when Trump Counsellor Kellyanne Conway defended White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s false statements at a White House press brief as “alternative facts”. Since then, the debate about how the media should deal with “alternative facts” has only increased in intensity as more of Mr Trump’s false claims saturate the news coverage. But, what are these alternative facts, if not lies? And what is the best way for journalists to deal with lies coming from the most powerful? Should journalists change the way they do their reporting? Together with Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Director of Research at the Reuters Institute, and Alan Rusbridger, former editor at the Guardian and principal of …

Digital technology has dramatically reshaped the news and media industries in the past decade. We’ve left behind a world where established news brands could rely on reaching large audiences and hence secure advertising revenues. Now there is huge uncertainty about business models, even as digital gives consumers more convenient access to news than ever before. The emergence of new players, including BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post, coupled with the growth of social networking, the introduction of smartphones and the evolution of online advertising, have contributed to a media landscape that is changing at considerable speed. We’ve been tracking the ways in which news habits online have been changing since 2012, when we launched our first survey from the Reuters Institute …

When journalists at the Southern Weekly newspaper in China’s Guangdong province went on strike last week against a local censor, Chinese citizens and the international media alike sat up and took notice. Microblogs amplified the journalists’ demands and helped make the incident a national topic of debate. Foreign commentators drew parallels to 1989, suggesting this could be the start of bigger protests. But the deal quickly reached between Communist Party officials and the striking journalists shows that the system of media control is still very resilient.

On 21 November 2011, the Oxford Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism hosted its annual Memorial Lecture at St. Anne’s College, exploring “The Rights of Journalism and the Needs of Audiences.” The topic shed light on the phone hacking scandals that occurred last summer, shaking both media and consumers alike, and culminating with the closure of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World. The Institute had the distinct pleasure of hosting renowned philosopher and former President of the British Academy, Baroness Onora O’Neill, to deliver the lecture. O’Neill framed her talk around the complicated relationship between the rights to privacy and free press, emphasising that the debate between these two key features of democratic societies fails to adequately show how …

Though Western media systems are going through a rapid and often painful transformation today with the rise of the internet and mobile platforms, the decline of paid print newspaper circulation, and the erosion of the largest free-to-air broadcast audiences, the ways in which governments provide direct and indirect support for the media have remained largely unchanged for decades. The bulk of the often quite considerable direct and indirect subsidies provided continue to go to industry incumbents coming out of broadcast and print, while innovative efforts and new entrants primarily based on new media receive little or no support. In central ways, public support for the media remains stuck in the twentieth century, and some parts of these support systems are …

In some ways this dichotomy might appear rather antiquated. After all isn’t everything online now and what difference do delivery systems make? But in reality we still see wide divergences between media organisations in terms of both consumption and production. First, consumption: The general tendency across many countries is that most people rely far more on TV than on the press for news. In the UK the disparity is very marked, with TV way out in front. Ofcom reported in 2009 that 74% of people in the UK used TV as their main source of UK news, way ahead of other news sources. More recent 2010 Ofcom figures surveying internet users showed TV ahead of the internet and newspapers as …

In the US debate over news there is an assumption among many that the Internet is killing news organisations.   People point to the worrying figures about the numbers of journalists that have been laid off  (with net newsroom employment down by more than 10,000 since 2007), the difficulties facing city and state newspapers, and to the dramatic decline of ad revenues. There’s no denying that these developments are worrying. But focussing on the US picture only tells a very partial part of the story about the relation between the news industry and the internet.  The recent book that we produced at the Reuters Institute on The Changing Business of Journalism and its Implications for Democracy reveals that the US newspaper …

A year can be a very long time in the life of media interest.  In December 2009, I was one of more than 4,000 journalists who attended the UN’s Copenhagen summit on climate change – probably the largest press presence for an international event outside of sport. The journalists came from 119 countries, and suffered the freezing temperatures and disappointing results.  It wasn’t just the Western press who were there. Emerging powers like Brazil and China both had more than 100 journalists. (see the  RISJ report at http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/publications/risj-challenges/summoned-by-science.html) One year on, and the next major summit at the Mexican resort of Cancun was much less of an attraction – despite the beaches, tequila and abundance of sun.  This time, around …