REPORT: The UK's Media Influence Matrix
A new report brings further insight into how the UK media is funded.
Have you ever wanted to map the UK’s news landscape, and the financial fluctuations influencing their output?
A new report released this month, titled ‘Media Influence Matrix UK: Funding Journalism’, tracks the changing landscape of UK news organisations, their fluctuating successes, and their funding models over the last few decades of an ongoing ‘crisis in journalism’.
It’s a collaboration by the Central European University and the Media Reform Coalition “set up to investigate the influence of shifts in policy, funding, and technology on contemporary journalism” funded by Goldsmiths, University of London, and the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust.
You may remember back in May I wrote about the tandem released of the MRC’s Who Owns the UK Media? report, and Harvard’s US Media Index, a map of the almost 3100 newsrooms in America, their reach, and who owns and/or funds them - this report complements and furthers that research.
This is not simply raw data or dry facts, although it contains plenty of useful information for anyone looking for stats; it also tells the story of the changing face of UK media over the last few decades. It begins:
“Before the arrival of the internet, journalism in the United Kingdom was organised into three main sectors: the major broadcasters, the national press and the regional press. […] Over time and in stages, the internet has radically transformed journalism in the UK.”
So embedded is the internet in our lives now, we all know this. But - so embedded is the internet in our lives now - today’s distracting typhoon of a media landscape, so often littered with fake news, government spin, and corporate disinformation, makes it difficult to understand where reliable sources might be found, what the political alliances of media outlets might be, who is influencing them from behind the curtain and why.
The merging of leisure and entertainment with social media, games and apps has slowly become so ubiquitous in our lives that, like a Frogger boiling in water, an entire globe of affluent countries sleepwalked into phone addiction. And the more eyeballs there are on social media feeds, the more advertisers pay social media companies - whether or not they are failing to deal with democratic interference, terrorism, or hate speech - rather than the salaries of journalists on the ground.
The report also uncovers the reasons why some papers have thrived while some have disappeared, outlining historical moments of change:
“In the aftermath of the defeat of organised labour in the newspaper printing industry, the collapse of printing costs spurred the launch of a number of new daily and Sunday newspaper titles. The Independent was one of these, launching as a quality daily newspaper in 1986.”
If you’re interested in understanding more about these changes, this report should give some insight into the status of the UK’s developing media industry.
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