News, in particular public interest news, is essential to the health of democracies. Public interest news can be defined as news that holds power to account and helps people campaign on issues that matter to them.
In recent years, the news industry has undergone a rapid transition, with incumbent players needing to adjust or perish in the face of new competitors, new platforms, as well as having to contend with new versions of old issues such as the spread of misinformation and disinformation.
Following the 2019 release of The Cairncross Review on the challenges that public interest news in the UK faces, Nesta launched the £2 million DCMS-supported Future News Pilot Fund. The mission of the Fund is to provide grants and other support for innovation in high-quality public interest news in the UK.
The research presented here was undertaken to support a closely related end: to better understand the multiple dimensions of the news and journalism landscape in the UK, with a particular focus on public interest news. The full research report can be accessed here.
Our research allows us to analyse employment trends across all news and journalism sectors. Using the search bar, the data is able to show trends across time in different regions, exploring trends in specialised sector employment and how this has shifted over time.
Looking at the business landscape, we can explore changes in the number of companies working in specific sectors of the news and media industry, discovering which areas were the most active for specific specialisations.
Our research allows us to analyse employment trends across all news and journalism sectors. Using the search bar, the data is able to show trends across time in different regions, exploring trends in specialised sector employment and how this has shifted over time.
Looking at the business landscape, we can explore changes in the number of companies working in specific sectors of the news and media industry, discovering which areas were the most active for specific specialisations.
Looking now at trends in companies founded over the last two decades, we can see that news and media sectors do not account for a large portion of the companies found on Crunchbase. This number drops even lower for those companies working in the public interest news sectors. Explore the trends across the years by sector above.
We broke down the data on levels of company founding activity by country, comparing the UK with the EU27 countries and North America (Canada and the United States). This allows us to see which countries have specialisations, i.e. more activity than would be expected given overall business activity, and if those have changed over time. Is North America the best for inclusive news or the UK for high-quality news?
Looking at the intersection between news and media, and growing technology sectors, we can begin to understand if there is any overlap and how this varies between the three regions.
In each plot, rows are technologies and the size of the coloured disc represents the percentage of companies in a news or media sector that is also classified as operating in a technology sector. The grey circles represent the overall proportion of all global companies that are classified in the technology sector.
Similarly to studying the crossover between news and technology sectors, we also look at the overlap between the public interest news sectors themselves. The chart below shows this crossover. Along each row, we can see the percentage of companies in that sector which are also classified as falling into the sector in a column.