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Dean Highlights The Reuters' 2025 Digital News Report So You Don't Have To
Consider this your invitation to get a drink, pop your feet up, and think about how the state of the world is conveyed to you rather than what the bad news of the week actually is.
(Is this escapism? Unrepentantly so. Also, a nerd out on the evolution of the media industry over the last few years. What else are you on the Motte for?)
This Monday the 2025 Digital News Report was published. This is a review of global media trends, such as how media consumption, habits, preferences, and audience composition have changed over the last years. It reflects on how various audiences consume and have been shaped by elements of the culture war, such as Musk's management of X, the rise of Tiktok, AI, and so on.
Given how much of the discourse here covers the coverage of these topics, this study seems salient. Especially since it is billed as the most comprehensive study of news consumption worldwide.
This is not an empty media boast. This probably is the most comprehensive, and global-spanning, media industry analysis I've read in some time, and while it's not without its blemishes. It's not without blemishes, but when the executive summary is 25 pages long (admittedly with many graphics), there's a lot to unpack. But since expecting anyone to read a 171 page report is a bit much, why not break it down a
bitlot?This post is going to be taking highlights, key points, and so on from the study executive summary. Much, but not all, will be quoted. I will make comments of my own where I feel most interested, but will try to keep my thoughts distinct from the article. Due to how it's formatted, it does not copy-paste neatly. Forgive the jank that slips through.
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Who is this by for whom and why should you believe a word of it?
This is Ivy League level academic research made with significant assistance by corporate media clearly hoping for actionable insights at a global level. Given the monetary incentives at stake, this is a case where commercial interests, including those well outside western progressive circles, are a mitigating influence to personal preferences.
The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism is a part of Oxford University in England. This is an academic-journalism nexus by, of, and for industry professionals. This level of academia has a lot of cross-pollination with the US, but this isn't 'merely' an advocacy section, but a professional interest institution.
The key sponsors and supporters of this report are identified on page 3 of the PDF. The 'main sponsor' is Google News Initiative, but the 'supported by' includes a whose-who of major western media companies. Not just newspaper companies like Reuters either, but groups like Youtube, BBC, Korea Press Foundation, Ofcom, CodeAfrica, and other media actors. This is Media as a Business, not media as a political faction, and the target audiences are global, not American-European specifically.
This sponsorship is key for understanding the article's focus on consumer demographics, preference changes, and so on. This is a report on 'how people consume digital news' paid by the types of groups that provide digital media. When it addresses topics of 'people are tuning out,' this is not (primarily) in the sense of an ideological 'people are ignoring us,' but in the context of 'consumers are not consuming your product for these reasons.'
This corporate motive is a basis to give credence to the data-driven observations here. This is a product paid for with money to generate more money, and so accuracy is an interest more than ideological performance. When the study talks about media market trends, it's for the sake of people who want a more accurate understanding of the media market.
That said... (Bias Warning)
Yes, there is bias, of a predictable pro-media-establishment sort. Oxford is still a prestige university, and the Reuters Institute being a professional interest institution is still both for, by, and once again for journalists. Unsurprisingly, they have a good impression of themselves, and bad impression of others who doubt their conduct or character. The dislike of Trump is palpable in the way that only 'we will use studiously neutral language except for our word choice framing unfavored actors' can be, and gets a bit more blatant in country-by-country breakdowns deep in.
That said- it's still worth reading. This is what it looks like when people try to mitigate their biases and take an objective look at the situation. Whatever the authors of a specific section may feel people should feel about themselves, they are not adverse to directly recognizing things like low reputational trust.
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The Methodology
This is a 'good enough to be useful' YouGov online questionnaire between January and February 2025, not a 'gold standard' method. Page 6 has the disclaimers and caveats for how strongly, or not strongly, to take certain elements. Statistics given should be understood to be ballpark estimates.
• Samples were assembled using nationally representative quotas for age, gender and region in every market. Education quotas were also applied in all markets except Kenya, Nigeria, Morocco, Peru, and Thailand. We also applied political quotas based on vote choice in the most recent national election in around a third of our markets including the United States, Australia, and much of Western Europe. The data in all markets were weighted to targets based on census/industry accepted data.
Note that 2024 was a year of many major elections in the US and Europe. As a result, this (should) reflect a fair deal of European political distribution.
• Data from India, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa are representative of younger English-speakers and not the national population, because it is not possible to reach other groups in a representative way using an online survey. The survey was fielded mostly in English in these markets,1 and restricted to ages 18 to 50 in Kenya and Nigeria. Findings should not be taken to be nationally representative in these countries.
The survey was not done in English in most markets, however, giving substantial insight potential.
• More generally, online samples will tend to under-represent the news consumption habits of people who are older and less affluent, meaning online use is typically over-represented and traditional offline use under-represented. In this sense, it is better to think of results as representative of the online population.
This is the key caveat. This is not a full study of all media consumers, but specifically online media consumers, i.e. the generation of today and the trends to expect to grow tomorrow as old people die and younger people replace them.
• The use of a non-probability sampling approach means that it is not possible to compute a conventional ‘margin of error’ for individual data points. However, differences of +/- 2 percentage points (pp) or less are very unlikely to be statistically significant and should be interpreted with a very high degree of caution. We typically do not regard differences of +/- 2pp as meaningful, and as a general rule we do not refer to them in the text. The same applies to small changes over time.
Don't put too much faith on the exact numbers, but do value the magnitude and general direction.
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Opening Narrative
This executive summary opens with this narrative, before many sub-sections. This section is quoted in full.
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Key Findings
This section is provided in full. Following sections will be selective extracts.
• Engagement with traditional media sources such as TV, print, and news websites continues to fall, while dependence on social media, video platforms, and online aggregators grows. This is particularly the case in the United States where polling overlapped with the first few weeks of the new Trump administration. Social media news use was sharply up (+6pp) but there was no ‘Trump bump’ for traditional sources.
One of the (not explicit) trends in the survey is that alternative-media news consumption increases as the engagement, and trust, in traditional media falls. There is more explicit recognitition of alternative media environments later.
• Personalities and influencers are, in some countries, playing a significant role in shaping public debates. One-fifth (22%) of our United States sample says they came across news or commentary from popular podcaster Joe Rogan in the week after the inauguration, including a disproportionate number of young men. In France, young news creator Hugo Travers (HugoDécrypte) reaches 22% of under-35s with content distributed mainly via YouTube and TikTok. **Young influencers also play a significant role in many Asian countries, including Thailand. **
One of the (non-explicit) parallels/trends in this study is that the US media market is diverging in style from Europe, and more towards Asia. This correlates with relative trust in establishment media and political polarization, which is characterized here as having been higher in Asia than in Europe for some time.
• News use across online platforms continues to fragment, with six online networks now reaching more than 10% weekly with news content, compared with just two a decade ago. Around a third of our global sample use Facebook (36%) and YouTube (30%) for news each week. Instagram (19%) and WhatsApp (19%) are used by around a fifth, while TikTok (16%) remains ahead of X at 12%.
Remember the selection bias for the yougov poll, but later points indicate that the increase in social media news-sourcing being done by younger demographics, i.e. the long-term future.
• Data show that usage of X for news is stable or increasing across many markets, with the biggest uplift in the United States (+8pp), Australia (+6pp), and Poland (+6pp). Since Elon Musk took over the network in 2023 many more right-leaning people, notably young men, have flocked to the network, while some progressive audiences have left or are using it less frequently. Rival networks like Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon are making little impact globally, with reach of 2% or less for news.
This surprised me a bit since there was a dedicated effort to undercut / subvert X due to Musk. Later data indicates this is more because more right-leaning people joined than left-leaning people left, which isn't surprising, but the failure of the rivals to scale upwards is notable as a long-term influence vector.
• Changing platform strategies mean that video continues to grow in importance as a source of news. Across all markets the proportion consuming social video has grown from 52% in 2020 to 65% in 2025 and any video from 67% to 75%. In the Philippines, Thailand, Kenya, and India more people now say they prefer to watch the news rather than read it, further encouraging the shift to personality-led news creators.
This is an interesting trend / potential causal loop where low trust in establishment media feeds social media sources, social media sources leading to more trusted personalities, and those personality-led creators being more successful with video, not just audio or text, as the way to establish their personality for the personal relationship trust.
• Our survey also shows the importance of news podcasting in reaching younger, better-educated audiences. The United States has among the highest proportion (15%) accessing one or more podcasts in the last week, with many of these now filmed and distributed via video platforms such as YouTube and TikTok. By contrast, many northern European podcast markets remain dominated by public broadcasters or big legacy media companies and have been slower to adopt video versions.
Video-podcasts are rising / eclipsing purely audio-podcasting, which may factor in the personal-relationship-trust alternative model raised above.
• TikTok is the fastest growing social and video network, adding a further 4pp across markets for news and reaching 49% of our online sample in Thailand (+10pp) and 40% in Malaysia (+9pp). But at the same time people in those markets see the network as one of the biggest threats when it comes to false or misleading information, along with Facebook.
Growth of tiktok is not surprising. Credibility might be noteworthy later. One of the information-conflict concerns over Tiktok is that Chinese control over the alorithm shapes what people will see, and thus believe. I've my doubts on the efficacy of that level of influence, and this point on platform-prevalence also corresponding with platform-skepticism suggest that the personality-led model will matter more, which mitigates/reduces the impact of algorithmic bias efforts.
• Overall, over half our sample (58%) say they remain concerned about their ability to tell what is true from what is false when it comes to news online, a similar proportion to last year. Concern is highest in Africa (73%) and the United States (73%), with lowest levels in Western Europe (46%).
Note that Western Europe is a major outlier in the media-skeptic trends, but even here it is a nearly 50-50 concern split. This will be relevant two items down.
• When it comes to underlying sources of false or misleading information, online influencers and personalities are seen as the biggest threat worldwide (47%), along with national politicians (47%). Concern about influencers is highest in African countries such as Nigeria (58%) and Kenya (59%), while politicians are considered the biggest threat in the United States (57%), Spain (57%), and much of Eastern Europe.
I'll just note with some humor that the 'influencers' are raised as the biggest threat, despite the same % as 'national politicians.' This is what I meant earlier about elements of bias seeping in.
• Despite this, the public is divided over whether social media companies should be removing more or less content that may be false or harmful, but not illegal. Respondents in the UK and Germany are most likely to say too little is being removed, while those in the United States are split, with those on the right believing far too much is already taken down and those on the left saying the opposite.
When combined with the online truthiness statistic above, this may suggest that efforts on the European level for media fact checking are hinged on (decreasing) higher-trust / older demographic of the political-establishment-center who feels things might yet still be saved.
If those European efforts don't become policy sooner than later, then as political polarization / political-right normalization continues, European markets may hit the same sort of political tipping point where political pluralities view 'confidence-boosting fact checking' as 'politically motivated censorship against them,' facilitating the trust spiral. Thus, a limited political window of opportunity before establishment fatigue leads to the current establishments being able to implement these policies to (hopeful) success.
• We find AI chatbots and interfaces emerging as a source of news as search engines and other platforms integrate real-time news. The numbers are still relatively small overall (7% use for news each week) but much higher with under-25s (15%).
There's an unsurprising theme of the younger generation being both the most online, the most attuned to social media, and the most comfortable with AI products.
• With many publishers looking to use AI to better personalise news content, we find mixed views from audiences, some of whom worry about missing out on important stories. At the same time there is some enthusiasm for making the news more accessible or relevant, including summarisation (27%), translating stories into different languages (24%), better story recommendations (21%), and using chatbots to ask questions about news (18%).
• More generally, however, audiences in most countries remain sceptical about the use of AI in the news and are more comfortable with use cases where humans remain in the loop. Across countries they expect that AI will make the news cheaper to make (+29 net difference) and more-up-to-date (+16) but less transparent (-8), less accurate (-8), and less trustworthy (-18).
• These data may be of some comfort to news organisations hoping that AI might increase the value of human-generated news. To that end we find that trusted news brands, including public service news brands in many countries, are still the most frequently named place people say they go when they want to check whether something is true or false online, along with official (government) sources. This is true across age groups, though younger people are proportionately more likely than older groups to use social media to check information as well as AI chatbots.
Trusted News Brands is relevant in part because the personality-driven social media network is also a 'trust' relationship. The key point I'd take away / spread is that when people don't feel they can trust traditional media, they are increasingly comfortable / able to defect to the non-traditional media based on trust in a personality, since that's the next-best proximity.
This (loosely) aligns with a regular critique I've made regarding public legitimacy of officials during COVID, when institutional lying lost public trust. Trust / credibility is a resource that's not easily regained.
• One more relatively positive sign is that overall trust in the news (40%) has remained stable for the third year in a row, even if it is still four points lower overall than it was at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic.
Remember that this study is by journalist professionals, for journalist professionals. Also remember the warning of bias earlier. 'We should consider it a good sign only 60% do not overall trust in our profession, only one-in-twenty less than during Covid' is damning with faint praise.
• As publishers look to diversify revenue streams, they are continuing to struggle to grow their digital subscription businesses. The proportion paying for any online news remains stable at 18% across a basket of 20 richer countries – with the majority still happy with free offerings. Norway (42%) and Sweden (31%) have the highest proportion paying, while a fifth (20%) pay in the United States. By contrast, 7% pay for online news in Greece and Serbia and just 6% in Croatia
This is business-actionable advice. Don't be surprised if some media corporation takes this as evidence that people need to be less happy with free offerings.
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The preceeding was just the first two pages of the Executive Summary, and this post is over 2/5ths of the word count. The rest of the EXSUM is section-by-section summaries, often elaborating on the key finding paragraphs posted above , so I will quote the major sections, and the most interesting bits by exception.
Please feel free to read the full thing. The executive summary is 25 pages, but it's one-paragraph bits like the above, and not terribly dense.
TRADITIONAL NEWS MEDIA LOSING INFLUENCE – UNITED STATES IN THE SPOTLIGHT
In culture-war terms, the red tribe seems to have succeeded in creating its alternative media ecosystem to survive (and thrive) in, and people are increasingly making the jump. X is not-quite-directly credited that elsewhere.
A non-culture-war explanation for part of the decline, however, is less about tribal politics, and more about technology and business models. As the internet streaming services have undercut cable TV, and internet aggregators undercut papers, traditional media consumption would be declining regardless of politics, just by medium-shift.
Already hit the drum that, in the absence of trusted institutions, people will turn to trusted individuals.
A humorous culture swing at our (western) European members here is that the reason they have higher trust in their media institutions because they have more forgettable media influencers to steal them away.
PLATFORM RESETS AND THEIR IMPACT ON NEWS MEDIA
ELON MUSK’S X AUDIENCE SHIFTS RIGHTWARDS - NO LOSS OF OVERALL REACH
The italicized not was in the original, and is one of the very rare cases it was used. This is about as much of a professional shock as the authors can convey.
This may also shape media company / advertiser perceptions of dealing with X. Part of the X-odus was the (alleged) advertiser boycott. Industry data suggesting the X-audience has not dropped, but in some categories expanded to underserved markets, would support media-actor changes over time.
There is a good graphic in the document (pg 15) which shows X dropping about 5% from 20% to 15% by politically-left respondents after Musk's takeover and rebrand, before jumping to 24% after Trump's election. Over the same general time period, right-respondents when from 9% to 26% to using Twitter for news.
This- combined with the failure of the left-social-sphere like Bluesky- makes X an uncontested (but now bipartisan) public forum.
RISE OF VIDEO NETWORKS INCREASES PRESSURE ON NEWS MEDIA
The exception of TikTok is one of those actionable things for the corporate media funders/audience. This is an incentive to try and make deals with TikTok for greater access, and/or a basis to try and lawfare TikTok out of their domestic media markets.
UNDERLYING PREFERENCES ARE SHIFTING TOO
In the correlations with easier, the countries with higher establishment media trust, and the higher willingness to support media truth-corrections, are also the countries where most people still prefer to read rather than hear (or watch) their online news.
The change of audience intake is liable to accelerate even in Europe, as media corporations (the study founders) are in a feedback loop of providing more video to meet demands for video, which are accelerating demands for video.
This suggests a... not imminently, but already changing media relationship that will- through the European sharing of US online service providers like Google- bring Europe towards the global norm of personality-media (the winners of video-format), and its associations with lower trust in traditional institutions. Which feeds into the 'window of opportunity' point for any establishment efforts at information-regulation.
THE CHANGING SHAPE AND GROWING INFLUENCE OF NEWS PODCASTING
I wonder how much of the US podcast culture is because of how it aligns with American driving culture, where a podcast is something you can do on the commute to work.
ONLINE MISINFORMATION AND NEWS LITERACY
This is one of the sections where the professional/personal biases of the presenters can probably be most easily inferred.
Buried further down...
I doubt the term 'liberal agenda' was chosen entirely by accident after 'powerful agenda.' (Particularly since 'progressive' barely shows in the study- primarily in the Twitter/X exodus after Musk, and then a few times in the later country studies.)
NEWS LITERACY MAKES LESS DIFFERENCE THAN YOU MIGHT THINK
This one is amusing.
Remember- the age demographic most likely to eschew traditional media for personality-driven social media is also the demographic more likely too have received literacy training.
So- how do you define success?
There is an interesting potential future implication this might have when it comes to corporate lobbying for media regulation / truthiness. Remember that this study was founded by, among others, Google and Youtube. They don't like necessarily that literacy trainign people are concerned a bit more about social and video networks... but young people are also predominantly on those networks, and more importantly, so are the trusted personality-centric mediators.
As a result, increasing concerns about misinformation- both of social media but also traditional media- is more likely to drive audiences to the personalities on the networks that certain corporate strategies can aim to own the profit-streams of.
HOW AUDIENCES VIEW THE ISSUE OF CONTENT MODERATION IN SOCIAL MEDIA
This is your reminder that Oxford University, the university overseeing this research, is based in the UK.
The study does not address why non-westerners stand where they do on censorship responsibilities for the public good.
I've mentioned before the prospect of a 'window of opportunity' for European center-left establishments to enforce moderation/censorship policies on media. There are definitely efforts that have been done in the past / are underway in thhe present, but this 'limited opportunity' is the stability/longevity of these dominant coalitions to do so before the ongoing political trends of European establishment delegitimization, the rise of the right, and the demographic turnover change many of the base conditions.
I won't make a position of what will or will not succeed in the next five years, especially with Donald Trump and US (social) media companies as a foil for European nativist efforts, but I wouldn't be surprised if moderation propositions run into consistently increased resistance beyond five years from now.
TRUST IN THE NEWS
Remember from earlier, that the 'stable ever since' was '4 points lower than during covid.'
WHAT THE MEDIA COULD DO TO INCREASE TRUST
This is the last section I'll cover due to post size, but I'll quote it in full due to salience.
All in all, a good and refreshing bit of frankness of some of the challenges, and things that are in the study's audience (media corporations and journalists) to take away.
Which, of course, is why this section ends with this-
I hear a 'but the bad news' coming on...
Well, they can't annoy the wrong people with truth telling, or let hostile groups use transparency to take things out of context. Better to annoy the right people, and let no one else benefit from the transparency when hostile groups point and accuse.
Le sigh.
This break down ends here. There are ten more pages of the EXSUM, but this is already at 45k words and I doubt I'd get through the rest... and its already 45k words. Plus, what remains transitions more into the clearly business-model-focused stuff, albeit a lot of it dealing with AI.
Instead of carrying on, I'll leave with an endorsement. Despite how I feel about that end section, there is a lot of good data to go over here, and more topics of interest. Chances are if you've read this far, you'd be willing to do so further if any of the topics catch your eye. Do so! Here's the link to the study one last time, and I'll end on the remaining sections.
This makes me wonder if the rise of podcasting/media is partially due to the fact that when you don't trust someone, you want to get more senses/more data when you take in information. It's much easier to consistently lie in print than it is in a talkshow or video, if only because you can pick up on tone of voice, pitch, etc etc.
It's worth noting that a 90th percentile liar can lie much more effectively in high-context communications than in text. I agree that people are more inclined to trust a notorious lying liar who is a familiar face and can perform authenticity on camera, but they shouldn't be.
Eh, I still think in general while yes an extremely good liar can pull it off, it's much harder on average. Perhaps if you get all of your news from one person it is riskier.
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That's part of it. When working in lower-trust societies, people make judgements based on their personal relationships, and part of that personal relationship comes from non-textual connotations. There are some writers who can convey their own personality, but by and large its easier and quicker to do so on the basis of the factors you mention.
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I really love how trust erosion in the news is something that just happens. No one is responsible. The same way cars ram into parades. It just happens people.
2015 the media decided that stopping Trump is more important than the truth and they burned the social capital that they have been accumulating for more than a century. Trump is not stopped and they don't deliver the truth. So what is the point in their existence?
I've been in rooms full of serious mainstream journalists talking between colleagues about the crisises of their profession and there is no introspection happening. Their solution to the trust crisis is to debunk disinformation harder. There is no realisation that the rise of "disinformation" (of the "alternate perspective the journalist doesn't like", "someone made a mistake handling facts" and "random guy on the internet wrote outright falsehood" kinds) is purely an effect of their own actions.
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I'd like this to be true but it seems very trivially not. Not in the sense that most people wouldn't say this, I don't doubt that at all, but they are either lying or have no self-knowledge. If people wanted depth they would be deserting popular 'mainstream' news for the most high-brow alternatives, not the worst social media slop. If they wanted to they could even just go and pick up a copy of the Economist and become part of the most well-informed 5% of the public on world news, but they don't.
HACKER: Don't tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country. The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country. The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Financial Times is read by people who own the country. The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country. And The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is. HUMPHREY: Prime Minister, what about people who read The Sun? BERNARD: Sun readers don't care who runs the country as long as she's got big tits.
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These people do not generally trust that the Economist is where well-informed people are. That's what widespread loss of faith in institutions looks like.
Fine, but I simply don't believe anyone goes to social media because they think that's where the informed people are, they just can't be bothered to read. 95% of people wouldn't even have the basic knowledge with which to begin questioning something they read in the Economist.
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The Economist isn't particularly highbrow either. Kind of mid-wit for just recycling consensus takes with branding. Very much in the middle of the low-mid-high IQ meme.
To be honest, though, everything is midwit if you’re an internet snob like you and me, Dean. Bellingcat? The ultimate midwit NAFO publication. The London/NY/Paris Review of Books? Catastrophically midwit zine read by aging socialists of the kind who use The Guardian’s dating platform and chuckle at another lame Trump nickname at dinner parties. The New Yorker? Vanity Fair? Magazines for parents of Juilliard students, nought more need be said. The popular substacks or newsletters (unaffiliated or affiliated) of erstwhile online political commentators (Iglesias, Sullivan, Klein)? Soothing balm for dull, aging millennial and GenX centrists upset at a world they no longer understand. More obscure commentator figures (Yarvin, Kriss)? Slightly more verbose Twitter bait dressed up for the audience of clapping chimps paying $5 a month to chuckle gently while pretending to do their email job and thinking themselves above the worker ant masses consuming their cyber slop.
In the end, the choice is between the last few good blogs (never read the comments), the intelligent but supremely annoying autists at HN and LW (but only on topics they know something about), prediction markets, a few good bank and third party research analysts if you can get access through your company, some columnists that agree with your personal biases at major publications and this place.
I love you and @BurdensomeCount's fun elitist views. Not elitist in a negative way, and you both seem to really mean it! It's quite enjoyable.
What are some of the last few good blogs?
Scholar's Stage though he mostly focuses on running a professional China centre these days.
NS Lyon? Apparently now discontinued.
Wyclif's Dust?
Thanks! Yeah already follow Lyons (he's Orthodox btw!) and the Wyclif guy looks interesting. Subbed to him.
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Assuming that the advertisers know what they are doing, the Economist readership is about as highbrow as you can get. If you ignore the filler (i.e. the articles) and focus on the paid-for content (i.e. the ads) there are far more yachts, Rolexes etc. in the Economist than in Tatler.
No, The Economist’s readership has a substantial number of students and juniors, plus interested normal people who like to imagine themselves as the kind of person who reads it, many of whom don’t have a lot of money. It’s largely the magazine for the back office. FT Weekend’s readership is likely wealthier, because it’s mainly older print readers of the paper who have some money (students and juniors on the app aren’t going to care to read it).
Tatler’s readership is bifurcated between that sub-group of rich Arabs and Asians (they have a big audience in Hong Kong, Singapore and the Gulf) who enjoy the Anglo aesthetic, are often involved with polo, ride, have country houses in England, that sort of thing, and the residual English upper and upper-middle classes, some of whom have money and some of whom don’t. That niche means Tatler’s ads are more targeted, although there is still plenty of Patek and Lori Piana. Bien pensant PMCs might read that awful Air Mail or even worse Monocle, which also have all the Rolex and Porsche ads.
I mostly think of the Economist as 'that magazine which is read by my friends who think that running a country would be easy if you could make everyone take an economics course'. It's Oxford's PPE degree between glossy covers - that particular arrogance engendered by a very wide purview and not-quite-deep-enough subject knowledge.
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That's why I said 'even'. Anyway the thing is you have to actually understand the consensus to know why you're against it. People aren't avoiding the Economist because they have considered and rejected the sort of mainstream centre/centre-right arguments it advances about given issues, they just find the things it writes about boring.
I would bet my house on the IQ of the average Economist reader being higher than that of the average consumer of almost any new media/social media outlet/person with a non-trivial following.
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What paper/magazine is highbrow then?
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Thanks for the summary, that was excellent. Did you find anywhere a further breakdown of who responded to the survey? I'm specifically interested in figuring out who the people in the UK are who responded saying they need more social media enforcement, because those people... have an interesting perspective.
I am so glad people can start seeing this again, mitigate your biases should be a war cry or a chant or something, maybe we can get Will Smith to sing about it once he's convinced everyone he likes pretty girls. If people can admit their biases and own up to them, I think they can be worked with. Regardless of their ideology. Like I'll even work with a communist neo nazi if they can admit their biases, because it is psychologically very difficult to, in a discussion with another person you respect, say 'yeah I know it's just bias making me think this way but ehhhh I'm sticking with it'. The bias is still strong it appears, but the more progressives are forced to interact with conservatives the more they will be forced to moderate.
I tell the women I sleep with the same thing (I'm so sorry everyone)
I feel like you are underselling how dedicated that push was though. The fact it isn't higher than 2%, after every progressive I know or follow swore they were leaving for bluesky, is blowing my mind.
You aren't wrong, but the business who decides this will be. God please let them do it. The countries spell it out - live somewhere comfortable and well off? Pay for news, why not, they do good work, they keep us informed, we all live in a society. Live in Greece? Yeah no, there are better uses for your money. I guess it wouldn't be a bad idea if we hadn't destroyed the middle class, but if you make everyone proles they aren't factoring the news into their budgets. And you can't really shift that model to the personality driven model without a significant cut to revenue.
It shouldn't, the leftist media mandated memeplex was always paper thin. They had the news and institutions but they didn't have the base. I saw it first hand in the various shitstorms like Gamergate and the kerfufles around Trump's first election. The viewcounts and updoots alone were lopsided by a factor of 100 and more. Online, where the kids and young adults were the numbers were staggering.
Yeah, true, and it also demonstrates how astro turfed progressivism is online. They were just so adamant, they checked the 'and this time, I mean it!' box and everything.
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There is a fair bit more source diving in the fuller paper, and more of the raw data stuff on the website that was linked in the 'billed as' section. IIRC, the main trend was 'political left consistently favors more content moderation of social media.'
Yeah I found the survey and breakdown by country, but I was hoping there was a breakdown per country.
Edit: never mind, found it - under each country, they just had to get in some paragraphs first, I should have realised.
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I just don’t understand why the journalist community is just incapable of self-correction here. The reason right-leaning news is growing is that it at least tries to get the facts right, and is open and honest about what it believes in. People like FOX and Joe Rogan because they’re trying to get things right and when they don’t get it exactly right, you at least know where they’re coming from. CNN pretends to be neutral but skews left and everyone is fairly aware of that.
I mostly go with AP and BBC when I’m trying to assess whether or not something is factual. Rogan is at least trying and has the virtue (increasingly rare in traditional news media) of letting the guests actually speak without interruption even when he clearly disagrees with them. And because of that, listeners at least get a full understanding of what that guest is trying to say. I find the practice of constantly interrupting the guests on a show to be annoying. If a conservative goes on CNN, he rarely gets to speak a complete sentence before getting cut off to make the counterpoint.
Ehhhhhh....some yes, many others no. The pressure to cater to the consumer's pre-existing beliefs is very strong, and right wingers are just as susceptible to confirmation bias and all the other old, familiar rationalist hobbyhorses as lefties.
Being entrenched in one's own opinions is different from trying to abolish lines of argument since they're -ist
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Journalism is a shrinking field, which means you need the respect of your peers to keep working in it, which means ‘impressing other journalists’ is more important than ‘impressing the public’.
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The incentives don't line up the right way. Both the external incentives (eyeballs, ad clicks, etc) and the internal ones (what bosses, themselves, and co-workers want)
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Spitballing on the lower reach of influencers in Western Europe, but one thing I've noted about local political YouTubers etc. is that they often just seem to be doing a "Finnish version" of something (Finnish Rogan, Finnish BreadTube etc.), and they can't quite seem to get it right, being left in an uncanny valley zone where it's not properly like the original version but not properly something culturally Finnish either. Ironically one of the rare organic forms of video creation we've managed to get going is the "rappiotube" ("decadencetube"), where alcoholics (occasionally mixing alcohol with drugs) just get completely wasted and go out of control on live shows, though of course it would be hard to create a political/news project based on that concept.
I'd appreciate some name drops, I'm now intrigued to gawk at the shitshow
The most notorious one is Pottukoira ("Potato dog"). I don't actually actively watch this shit so I can't confirm the level of drunkenness right now, but he appears to currently be in Estonia, so it is likely to be extremely high.
Is he supposed to be Tim Dillon?
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Summer of love 2025?
Just Midsummer 2025.
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