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From the Blog

  1. Readers aged 18–34 are spending nearly twice as much time with newspapers’ print editions than with their websites and apps. In 2016, the 18–34 year old British readers of eight UK national newspapers spent a total of 21.7 billion minutes reading the news brands’ print editions, but just 11.9 billion minutes using their websites and apps. This is one finding from my new study, co-authored with Richard Fletcher from the Reuters Institute at Oxford University.

    Photo: Sjoerd Lammers.

  2. Since Snapchat launched Snap Map in June, the feature has caused controversy, with parents, schools, and charities expressing concern about its use by children. However, Snap Map is just one of a range of apps that allows social network users to be monitored without their knowledge and with pin-point accuracy. Indeed some of these apps far exceed Snap Map in their surveillance capabilities, able to track individuals over time and across multiple social networks.

  3. News writing has remained the exclusive domain of journalists until relatively recently. But with the arrival of so-called automated or “robo” journalism, this is no longer the case. Automated journalism is software that converts structured data into stories with limited or no human intervention beyond the initial programming. It has already been deployed by several large news organisations – including the Associated Press which uses the technology to write thousands of business stories every year. Research I conducted recently looks at the opportunities and limitations of automated journalism.

  4. How diverse is the UK journalistic workforce in terms of gender, education, religion and ethnicity? In May 2016, together with Alessio Cornia and Jessica Kunert, I published the results of a survey of journalists in the UK and discovered that while diversity has improved in some respects, there‘s still a long way to go, and there are some worrying trends for the future.