OLD, EDUCATED, AND POLITICALLY DIVERSE: THE AUDIENCE OF PUBLIC SERVICE NEWS

“Public service media are often widely used, highly trusted, and do not face the business pressures with which their private peers have to contend. But a closer look suggests that the challenges that face public service media news provision are bigger – much bigger – than is commonly acknowledged, even in countries with a long history of strong public service media.”

Launched at the Public Broadcasting International conference, on 10 September 2019, the study Old, Educated, and Politically Diverse: The Audience of Public Service News by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism assesses the reach of news by eight European public service media organizations. This important contribution to document a major trend of public media highlights how, “[w]ith traditional linear broadcasting in inexorable structural decline, public service media will increasingly have to reach people online in a media environment characterised by (1) far more intense competition for attention due to much greater choice and (2) the role platforms – ranging from search engines to social media and messaging applications and in the future perhaps voice assistants – play in how people access and use news.”

Read the press release and the full report here.