Academics comment in The Economist on the future of news media

Dr David Levy (Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism), DrRasmus Kleis Nielsen (Post Doctoral Research Fellow) and Nic Newman (Visiting Research Fellow at Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism) have all been quoted in The Economist recently on the state of news media.

David Levy was quoted in article (7 July) on the current and future states of news media. Theres an assumption that theres a single crisis affecting all news organisations, and thats not the case, he said. There are different kinds of crisis in different countries, and some countries in the developing world are experiencing expansion rather than decline.

Rasmus Kleis Nielson was also quoted in the same article, commenting that even though Germany has seen a 10% drop in newspaper sales this is not a terrible result when seen in the light of the global financial crisis. The full article can be read here.

Nic Newman was quoted in an article on social media entitled The people formerly known as the audience (July 7). In it Nic is quoted as saying that the rise of the influence of social media has meant that news organisations are already abandoning attempts to be first to break news, focusing instead on being the best at verifying and curating it. The full article can be read here.

David has also written three articles for The Economists blog. The first, which can be read here, is entitled Outside America, the future is much brighter, in which he suggests that the vulnerable state of the newspaper industry in the United States will not necessarily be the shape of things to come for the rest of the world. The second, which can be read here, concerns the role of social media in news-gathering and is called No serious news-gathering operation can afford to ignore it. The third is called Newspapers perform a valuable role in enforcing local accountability, and can be found here.