Digital disruption is, in fact, no longer the cute new kid on the block — it is now a sturdy lad with a taste for murder.
There is a time-honoured question that gains importance every time news production is mediated by new technologies: What is news? Was the news published in pre-Independence India the same as the news of the Manmohan Singh era? Is the news that breaks on a television screen the same as the news generated through social media? Questions of this kind help to dispel the idea that news is something fixed and immutable. Sure, there are commonalities between various versions of news, but what is more relevant is that there are enormous differences, too.
The Reuters Digital News Report 2024, surveying data from across 47 national markets, prods us to reexamine the nature of news in a rapidly transmogrifying media environment. Some of the differences between various versions of the news are created by the values that go into discerning which events/occurrences in our daily lives deserve to be considered as newsworthy. Newspapers across the world wear their notions of news on their sleeve. The New York Times, for instance, claims to publish “All the news that’s fit to print”. Fox News tried to strut with a tagline that went “Fair and balanced”, but in 2017 this was rightly hooted out as unsuitable for its particular brand of news, which is anything but. This newspaper, The Indian Express, has the line “Journalism of Courage” to define it. Embedded in taglines of this kind are clues as to what each entity regards as the values that shape the manner in which it moulds news out of the clay of mere information.
While both the selection and treatment of news are basic to this process, as also the socio-political exigencies and economic constraints that backdrop it, what has changed in the internet era is the arrival of horizontalism. The vertical structures of newsmaking of the earlier days have suddenly been upended by the phenomenon of the network: The reader/viewer/scroller can now not merely choose their news from innumerable sources, but can mutate into becoming news sources themselves by sharing, editing and disseminating the stuff they put out on social media.
Digital disruption is, in fact, no longer the cute new kid on the block — it is now a sturdy lad with a taste for murder. The Reuters Digital News Report dwells on what it terms the “crisis” pervading the global news media ecosystem today. Some of the factors cited are known: The rise of mis- and disinformation; the decline of trust; the attempts by politicians and vested interests to capture the news-creating process; and the whole question of financial sustainability.
But there are new insights too that demand engagement. The first is that those big Silicon Valley giants, that have assumed commanding heights at the NASDAQ, are in it for themselves. They may claim to be committed to freedom of speech but even that could be iffy. They are absolutely not interested in helping to generate credible news. In fact, many of them, according to this report, are “actively reducing the prominence and role of news on their platforms, and moving further away from a reliance on links driving referrals to publishers”.
While some like Facebook are actively deprioritising news and political content, others wish to grow audiences by “pushing more fun and engaging formats — including video” — to keep their loyalties going. If this is “news”, it is news that can be promoted by anybody and their cat. Videos, particularly the short form video of a few minutes or less, seem to be the most preferred format, especially for younger audiences. Added to this is a new disrupting detail: Artificial Intelligence. AI, according to this report, is introducing a new dynamic peopled not by humans but by chatbots, which in turn are driven by user data, not concerns like relevance and public good. AI has also dragged in a fresh threat to credible news — the deep fake.
Changes in the external environment of media consumption are also worth registering. Readers, watchers and scrollers, buffeted by free-floating media, now seem to have a sharply diminished appetite to pay for online content. The report notes that growth in news subscriptions is poor: Just 17 per cent paid for their online news, and this was among the 20 richer countries; in much of Asia, online media consumption seems to be based on the understanding that it comes with no bill attached. There is also, in some markets, a disturbing fatigue for news, leading to news avoidance. This could be partly attributed to long-running news stories like the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza.
This country, though, appears to have bucked this trend of disengagement — although the data needs to be read with the disclaimer that its respondents were mainly English-speaking, online users. India has always had an active news market and the report notes that trust in news from both legacy and digital sources increased slightly in 2024, standing at 41 per cent, with legacy media brands “tending to retain the highest levels of trust”. But other trends show how social media like YouTube (54 per cent) and even WhatsApp (48 per cent) have emerged as important news sources.
The appeal of charismatic influencers on YouTube, or a news portal that is in sync with one’s personal worldview, is easy to understand. Influential commentators in a newspaper, or legacy media more generally, would find it difficult to strike a similar, intimate chord. But digital’s biggest asset, arguably, is its “shareability”, the ability to allow news users to assert their agency while engaging with something that makes them laugh, cry or rant against. Some 45 per cent of Indians share news. It appears then that Indian media users are increasingly opting to create their own news ecology, one where they feel comfortable and safe.
The findings in this report could be ephemeral, but they need to be read as important signposts in a news landscape where change is the only constant.
Philipose is the author of Media’s Shifting Terrain: Five Years that Transformed the Way India Communicates
