What journalism trends will emerge in the digital media era?

Survey results released by Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

Earlier this year, Reuters’ Institute for the Study of Journalism released a report titled: "Journalism, media, technology, trends, and predictions for 2021". Therefore, 2021 will be a year of profound digital changes following the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns and social distancing have broken old habits and shaped new ones. This will also be a year of economic reshaping, with publishers leaning into subscription and e-commerce that have been supercharged by this epidemic. While uncertainty has boosted audiences for journalism almost everywhere, the publishers who continue to depend on print revenues, or digital advertising face a difficult year.

Notably, many new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT)… will also lead to stronger performance and faster automation across many sectors, including publishing this year. But as AI moves out of R&D labs into the real-life application, we can expect more discussions on its impact on society, such as speed change, transparency, fairness...

The digital era also makes modern press and media continuously moved. A variety of new journalism trends will emerge, such as multimedia, cross-platform, mobile journalism, data journalism, social journalism, creative journalism,... Among these types of journalism, data visualization will play a big role in telling the story of how we continue to deal with the pandemic and its impact.

It is noted that audio continues to be the bright spot of the news media, with strong innovation in content and business models. We'll see a growing focus on paid podcasts (digital audio and video), and platform payments widening the range of monetization options.

Besides, 5G networks are increasingly booming globally, along with an increase in new devices including wearables and smart glasses. All of this suggests that news agencies will need to prepare for a future that involves taking content and brands across more and more devices and distribution channels.

In addition, social networks such as Google, Facebook... are gradually attracting most of the advertising revenue all news agencies. As a result, the latter must think about a news-press subscription model rather than releasing free content to generate advertising revenue. Even, the Reuters institute said that the subscription will be considered the most important revenue stream, ahead of advertising.

While some media experts still see the display and native advertising as the most important revenue streams after subscriptions. 

It is obvious that the advertising activities are still a large chunk of revenue for many news agencies, but every sign points to a future where it is not the main income for most news publishers. Instead, it seems that e-commerce and live events are poised to become more prominent, and may displace more traditional revenues.