Financial and technological transformation have forced news outlets, especially those serving local communities, to close. Advertising revenue for newspapers plummeted by nearly half in the ten-year period ending 2019, and then COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated this trend, now threatening to create and “extinction level” event for independent journalism outlets. Moreover, social media poses “existential threat” to traditional, trustworthy news, says UNESCO. In the past five years, the report has highlighted, both news audience and advertising revenue have moved in huge numbers, from 35 per cent in 2016 to 54 per cent in 2021, to internet platforms, with only two companies – Google and Meta (formerly known as Facebook) – soaking up half of all global digital advertising spend.The report has indicated the threat to “freedom of the press” because news outlets often struggle to get clicks from readers that determine advertising revenue, and many find themselves “squeezed out” by the proliferation of new voices in the online space and algorithms of digital intermediaries.In the digital ecosystem, the large internet companies have thus turned into the “new gatekeepers”. Social media users have nearly doubled from 2.3 billion in 2016 to 4.2 billion in 2021 accessing more contents and voices – but not necessarily with the distinctive added value of journalistic content.The pandemic since the beginning of 2020 has exacerbated the decline of advertising revenue, job losses, and newsroom closures. During this period, false content even relating to the pandemic spread rapidly in social media, while journalistic job cuts crated a ‘significant vacuum’ in the information landscape, particularly in low and middle-income countries.For example, in September 2020, over one million posts circulated on Twitter with inaccurate, unreliable, or misleading information. A survey has found at least two-thirds of the journalists feeling less secure in their jobs due to economic pressures on news media organisations.
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