Report: Trends in Newsrooms 2013

While editors around the world continue to struggle with ongoing challenges relating to tight budgets and smaller newsroom staffs, we also see a number of trends that make our profession promising, interesting and valuable.

Here are five key trends we highlight in this 88-page report:

1. 1. Mobile – As tablet and smart phones sales have exploded during the past year, more people than ever are spending more time accessing news on their mobile devices. The demand for good mobile content is rising and is expected to keep rising in the near future.

1. 1. Innovative storytelling – Projects such as The New York Times’ recent Pulitzer Prizewinning story Snow Fall increasingly will become the norm as more news publishers start thinking in terms of multimedia elements from the beginning of the process rather than as afterthoughts tacked on at the end of it.

1. 1. Paid digital content – Although it no longer promises to be the “silver bullet” revenue solution that news organisations have been hoping for to replace declining print advertising revenue, paid digital content can provide a significant stream of income, and seems likely to become standard in many parts of the world.

1. 1. Social media – Most organisations are now using social media both for finding stories and for distributing news. For breaking news during a crisis, social media is becoming the first place where many, particularly young people, go for updates. It is also becoming more common that a journalist’s first instinct when covering fast moving news is to tweet about it.

1. Data and metrics – Analytics are increasingly becoming a tool used by journalists as well as by data specialists to understand traffic and reader habits. Using analytics isn’t strictly a way of interacting with your audience but it is a way to understand how your audience interacts with your content.

In addition, press regulation measures relating to ethical concerns remain an ongoing issue for many editors, and we examine some of the most recent developments in this area.