In 2022, Impress carried out extensive public engagement research and published its first News Literacy Report.
Conducted in collaboration with the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds and the School of Humanities and Journalism at the University of Derby, the research project surveyed 3044 representative respondents across the UK in addition to conducting in-depth focus group work.
The 42 questions in the survey were wide ranging to capture nuances in attitudes to and understandings of the different regulatory environments, knowledge of journalism, accountability mechanisms, and responsibility for regulation and oversight of the news media.
In today’s media landscape, the importance of understanding the public’s relationship with the news and journalism is as important as it has ever been. Journalism is changing. Audience engagement is now intertwined with news production in multiple ways, from crowdsourced investigations and citizen journalism. These changes have been wrought by the dominance (and decline) of advertising revenue in news publishing, click-driven traffic models, and intimate user interaction (from familiarity to hostility) on social media.
This report presents the findings of our research, outlining current news consumption habits and values and the key challenges this presents for news journalism and regulators, before going on to consider some solutions for addressing these challenges.
