ICFJ SURVEY ON THE STATE OF TECHNOLOGY IN GLOBAL NEWSROOMS

The State of Technology in Global Newsrooms is the first-ever survey on the adoption of digital technologies in news media worldwide. The International Center for Journalists, working with Georgetown University, conducted the study in 12 languages, and received more than 2,700 responses from journalists and newsroom managers in 130 countries. The author of the report is Diana Owen, Associate Professor at the CCT program. Other collaborators included Storyful, Google NewsLab and Survey Monkey.

The survey aimed to find out: Are journalists and newsrooms keeping pace with the digital revolution? How are journalists adapting to the digital technology and changes that are taking place in their newsrooms?

Some of the main findings include:

– Technologists remain sparse in newsrooms. Just 5% of newsroom staff have technology-related degrees, and 2% of newsrooms employ technologists. Only 1% employ analytics editors.
– Managers are more skilled in digital media than their employees. Sixty-four percent of newsroom leaders were hired with a background in digital media, compared with 45% of journalists.
– Most newsrooms are not redefining roles for the digital era. Eighty-two percent of newsroom jobs remain in established roles (reporters,
editors, editorial writers). About 18% are new digital roles (social media editor, digital content producer, analytics editor).
– Journalists use a limited range of digital skills. Of the 23 digital skills we surveyed, most newsrooms primarily use four: posting/commenting on social media (72%), taking digital photos (61%), engaging audiences on social media (58%), and distributing content across multiple platforms (56%).
– Only 11% of journalists use social media verification tools, though most (71%) use social media to find new story ideas.
– More than half of journalists (54%) and newsrooms (52%) fail to secure their communications.
– Less than half of newsrooms (45%) consult analytics daily. Newsrooms primarily use analytics data to drive traffic to their websites.
– Pageviews is the metric that gets the most attention from newsrooms (73%). Much less attention is given to engagement metrics: social shares (46%), conversion rate (18%), and scroll depth (16%).

Read the full report here.