Whilst OneSub took part in the Nesta: Future News Pilot Fund in lockdown, the Nesta research team were mapping the news landscape. We take a quick look at the Nesta report highlighting their key findings.

After the Cairncross review in 2019 looking at sustainable future of journalism, Nesta launched the Future News Pilot Fund. They spent their time funding grants like us here at OneSub and other organisations involved in public interest news, as well as research into mapping the news, media and journalism landscape here in the UK.

Trends in employment in News and Journalism:

In 2011-2017 a consistent 85,000 people were working in journalism in the UK and related industries. However, the makeup of the jobs has changed with an increase in sectors such as web portals and a decrease in news and printing. Despite this decline in jobs in the news, newspapers are still the largest employers in this sector.

News and Journalism start-up squeeze:

Using Crunchbase the Nesta researchers looked at the number os startups in and around journalism and found a steady decline in news-related startups since 2009. In 2009 there were 2.2% of companies categorised as news organisations but this is now down to 1.5%.

Although funding for startups has grown in this period, it is still relatively low if compared to sectors such as AI and blockchain.

Measuring support for news and journalism:

Researchers compared UK to US looking at a total of 431 projects in the UK which got at least £5,000 of funding or more and compared with 7,635 projects in the US which got £5,000 or more and found that the median grant size for projects in the UK is 40% smaller than its counterpart in US.

Scale and scope of misinformation research:

Before the 2016 US elections, most misinformation research was centred on Medicine, however, after the elections, there was a drastic shift towards politics, internet privacy and fake news. The UK produces the second largest volume of misinformation after the US, with 90% of these being based in London, Oxford and Cambridge.

Public interest news hinting at slowing down and time for change:

There has been a gradual, steady decline in founding activity in those companies working in journalism. Some companies are on the fringe and work in an overlapping area between public interest news and another area, mostly focused on creating revenue from news rather than creating public interest news stories.