Twenty-First Century Newsroom

Overview

The newsroom of the twenty-first century is vastly different from newsrooms of the past in a number of significant ways, including being smaller and more professional. Major job losses have led to a brain drain in modern newsrooms. The chief reasons for change are the creation of the Internet and new and more interactive technologies that have led consumers to make new demands on modern newsrooms. Traditionally trained newsroom staff are sometimes reluctant to adapt to new media environments. As consumers have increasingly turned to online sources, traditional newsrooms have suffered financially from the loss of advertising revenue, subscriptions, and paid content.

As a result of reduced newsroom staffs, the twenty-first century newsroom is smaller. Since senior reporters and staff may be the first to be laid off, newsroom staff may also be less experienced, and younger journalists may lack mentors. Many feel that loss of jobs has had a major impact on the quality of news coverage. Another significant difference is the use of citizen journalists who cover the news as it is happening with smartphone cameras and dreams of breaking a major news story.

Newsrooms are required to exist as multimedia platforms, and newspapers, television stations, and radio stations maintain online presences through websites, blogs, newsletters, and social media accounts. Following the era of sensationalist and biased yellow journalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mainstream media has prided itself on its objectivity, but that objectivity is now being questioned in the United States as political divisions continue to grow. In the past, newspapers were generally family owned, but twenty-first century newspapers are controlled by large syndicates, billionaires, and cross-media industry giants. This trend has consolidated many smaller news organizations and occurred alongside a decrease in the number of local independent newspapers in communities across the US.

Some scholars question whether new media has empowered or compromised the role of journalists who have been charged with keeping the public informed. The Internet has become an essential tool in modern newsrooms, and it is used in a variety of ways. Newsrooms maintain websites to offer online access or to supplement broadcast and print editions. Because hyperlinks provide easy access to original sources, it is no longer necessary to go through a complicated process of obtaining permission to use copyrighted material. The news can also be delivered faster and more efficiently over the Internet than by print or broadcast news. However, newsrooms face increased competition. For instance, when newspapers charge subscription rates for online access, users may choose to go to other sites where the same news is freely offered. Instead of journalists being held responsible by editors, publishers, and readers to tell the truth, the Internet offers almost unchecked opportunities for the spread of lies, rumors, conspiracy theories, and other forms of "fake news," and the public has abundant opportunities to consume only that news which confirms their existing biases.

For decades, many newsrooms were also reluctant to fully engage with social media. For much of the 2010s, journalists' use of social media was generally limited to Facebook and Twitter, and posts often only provided content links to their own websites. By that point, some journalists had begun using Twitter essentially as a news service to keep up with breaking news stories. For instance, news of the death of Osama bin Laden in May 2011 was transmitted through the Twitter account of Keith Urbahn, a member of the staff of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, even before President Obama was notified.

By the 2020s, social media use had become more common among journalists and most major print publications maintained an online presence through Twitter and other social media platforms. By that point, journalists had also begun using other emerging social media platforms, including TikTok. Still, Tim Gallagher, president of the 20/20 Network, suggested in 2018 that twenty-first century newsrooms were not willing to deal with the issue of declining trust in journalism or the prevalence of misinformation in contemporary media. Gallagher also argued that newsrooms were failing to take full advantage of social platforms as a means of mitigating common problems, such as reduced newsroom staffs and revenue. He identified a number of reasons for these failures, including budgetary limits, lack of training, paying more attention to the number of followers than to the need to engage new audiences, and maintaining a focus on traditional journalism.

Other newsroom innovations have included creating new and more open office spaces to encourage collaboration and the exchange of ideas, hiring multimedia journalists, and expanding online presences of traditional media. In 2014, First Media launched Project Unbolt to disengage print culture from traditional media and move it toward new media practices. Despite efforts to adapt to changing circumstances, many publications in the US and other countries struggled to adapt to changing circumstances; these consequences were often particularly dire for local newspapers in smaller communities. For example, between 2005 and 2021, roughly 2,200 local print newspapers shut down in the US, highlighting the challenges of conducting journalism in a rapidly changing media market. In the meantime, a 2021 Pew Research Center study found that the number of people employed in US newsrooms shrank 26 percent between 2008 and 2021. In 2023, the US and UK cut at least 8,000 journalism jobs. Layoffs slowed down in 2024, but still resulted in almost 4,000 layoffs.

Applications

At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, researchers John O’Sullivan and Ari Heinonen examined the views of 239 journalists in forty news outlets in Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom with an average of fourteen years in the business. They found that most considered the Internet “very useful” in discovering utility information and for looking up information such as addresses and telephone numbers. They found it less useful in finding government and corporate information. Some 84 percent of participants found blogs useful in keeping up with news, and 64 percent did not feel threatened by the rise of citizen journalists.

O’Sullivan and Heinonen also argued that most journalists feel that online journalists are better than print journalists at taking the pulse of the public. Almost 80 percent acknowledged that the Internet was useful in finding sources of information about particular issues. Forty percent felt that online journalism was more accurate than traditional journalism, but 36 percent found it less accurate. Other studies have revealed that journalists rely on the Internet for news gathering, fact-checking, research, contacting sources, and obtaining ideas for stories.

In the United States alone, 1,808 jobs in the news sector were cut in 2022. While this was a sharp decline from the 13,500 newsroom jobs cut in 2009 alone, it still highlighted the fact that the sector was struggling to adjust to a changing media marketplace. Similar cuts have taken place in the United Kingdom and Australia. The loss has hit newspapers particularly hard, and many have been forced to close their doors. In the New Beats project, Penny O’Donnell, Lawrie Zion, and Merryn Sherwood (2016) examined newsroom job loss in Australia by conducting a five-year longitudinal study of ninety-five journalists who lost their jobs. Between 2001 and 2010, Australian newsroom staffs were cut 27 percent. Between 2013 and 2014, another one thousand jobs were lost, resulting in a 20 percent job loss. In the New Beats study, the average age of those laid off was forty-nine, and 40 percent were fifty or older.

Another study found that more than half of all UK laid-off newsroom employees were over forty during the 2010s. Studies consistently show that older employees find it harder than younger employees to find new jobs. Some 94 percent of New Beats participants were print journalists working at large metropolitan newspapers, and half were senior editors. Participants averaged twenty-five years on the job. Almost 70 percent had tertiary qualifications, and 18 percent had postgraduate degrees. Two years after being laid off, only 28 percent had found other jobs in journalism, and 42 percent were still looking for jobs. Among those who had found work, 80 percent had jobs in higher education, strategic communication, and media-related positions; however, most were working part-time or doing freelance work for less money and status. New Beats participants reported feeling a variety of emotions upon losing their jobs: sadness, relief, anger, disillusionment, betrayal, guilt, elation, resignation, and anxiety. Two-thirds of New Beats participants expressed negative reactions to job loss as compared to 62 percent in a UK study.

Not all technologies used in twenty-first century newsrooms are related to the Internet. A number of newsrooms are using drone technology developed by the military to make news reporting safer and more comprehensive. For example, after a massive earthquake in Japan in 2011, journalists were banned from onsite reporting at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which experienced a catastrophic meltdown as a result of the disaster, for safety reasons. Journalists were forced to depend on the Japanese government for information. Thereafter, newsrooms began to look for easily accessible and inexpensive ways to report on news following earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, and wildfires. They discovered that drones could also be used to cover high school football games, graduations, and public events. Drones are capable of sensing, capturing aerial photographs and videos, processing information, and taking action. They are also being used at disaster scenes to detect human bodies inside destroyed buildings, to transmit live streams during disasters, to digitally map hurricanes, and to analyze data before and after hurricanes.

Application of drone technologies in newsroom reporting remained popular into the 2020s. For example, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, organizations such as The New York Times collected drone footage of battlefields, troop movements, and damage to cities following air or artillery raids. This drone footage was used for a number of applications; sometimes, it assisted in data collection for traditional reporting, while other times this footage was incorporated into multimedia projects published online.

Issues

Amid the rise of the #MeToo movement in 2017, which highlighted sexual harassment across entertainment, journalism, and a number of other industries, a number of noted media personalities were fired from positions they had held for years, including Roger Ailes of Fox News, Matt Lauer and Mark Zimmerman of NBC, Charlie Rose of CBS, Mark Halperin of MSNBC, Mike Oreskes and David Sweeny of NPR, Garrison Keillor of Minnesota Public Radio, and Leon Weiseltier of New Republic. Thus, the public has become increasingly conscious about the need to address the issue of sexual harassment in newsrooms.

When news of the conduct of the men brought down by #MeToo came to light, it was clear that harassment and toxic work environments had been going on for decades at many of these news agencies, but survivors of their harassment had been fired, cowed into silence, or ignored. While most men did not engage in sexual harassment, they did remain quiet, even when they knew what was happening because of apathy, indifference, or fear of losing their own jobs. In the case of Roger Ailes, for instance, his misconduct had been documented by Vanity Fair's Gabriel Sherman in a 2014 biography of Ailes, The Loudest Voice in the Room. Yet, Ailes remained in his position until 2017. In the United Kingdom, the BBC reported that it was investigating twenty-five separate cases of sexual harassment reported by its employees. The impact of the #MeToo movement continued into the 2020s as new scandals emerged, including some at news organizations; while the movement helped take down a number of powerful individuals who had previously avoided consequences for their actions and encouraged a shift in discussions about harassment, sexual assault, and a number of other issues, some observers argued that more work still needed to be done.

After numerous cities across the US, including Detroit, Michigan, and Los Angeles, California, were rocked by large race riots in the 1960s, the National Commission on Civil Disorders, better known as the Kerner Commission, recommended that newsrooms add more African American employees in order to better understand that community’s culture and needs. Despite that, most newsrooms continued to be dominated by White people. On March 3, 1991, Los Angeles police officers were videotaped beating African American taxi driver Rodney King. After a predominately White jury acquitted the officers, riots broke out in Los Angeles, and it became abundantly clear in news coverage that most White journalists were unable to understand all the implications of conditions in Los Angeles that led to the riots. That recognition led to increased demands for more ethnic diversity in American newsrooms.

Another flashpoint in the debate over ethnic diversity in US newsrooms occurred following the massive George Floyd protests of May and June 2020, which occurred in response to the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis, Minnesota, police officer. These protests triggered intense debate over representation in many forms of media, including journalism, and also led many journalists in the US to re-assess their coverage of earlier racial justice protests. Importantly, these protests, along with the accompanying Defund the Police movement, sparked debate over whether or not journalists tend to rely too heavily on official sources, such as police reports, in their research and prompted some observers to suggest that news organizations approach such sources with greater scrutiny.

Geneviêve A. Bonin conducted a study of Canadian radio journalists and managers in the late 2010s to determine when newsrooms choose to employ user-generated content, finding five reasons given: perceptions of audience demands, the value the content added to news reporting, financial pressures, company policies, and the need to uphold professional standards. Bonin learned that, instead of addressing ways to become more innovative, newsrooms tended to focus on more effective and efficient reporting. Instead of declining, Canadian radio advertising revenue amounted to $1.1 billion in 2022, a slight increase over the previous year. There are four hundred radio stations that belong to the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters. In Canada, around half of all stations ae commercial FM stations, and Bonin examined nine commercial, public, and community stations, finding that most were still depending on microphones, a control console, and computer broadcasting software to produce the news.

In 1962, Everett Rogers, a prominent American sociologist and communication theorist, developed a theory on the diffusion of innovation, suggesting that both individuals and groups adjust to innovation through such measures as understanding the advantages of new methods of doing things in comparison with traditional methods, being able to try a new method before committing to it, and observing the innovation in practice. Building on Rogers’s work, other scholars have found that group members are more likely to embrace innovations when they have officially been adopted by an organization. Younger group members are generally more likely than older members to be willing to try innovations. Newsrooms have become dependent on user-generated content to discover what their audience wants and how they react, to promote particular products, to keep up to date on what is happening, as witnesses to events, for purposes of verification, and to find news stories.

Terms & Concepts

Brain Drain: The term is used to describe the movement of highly intelligent and trained people from one country or region to another. In popular use, it is also used to describe movement out of certain fields, and scholars have suggested that massive reductions of media staff have led to a brain drain of qualified media professionals and those who might enter the profession to other fields less vulnerable to job loss.

Citizen Journalists: Refers to ordinary citizens who capture newsworthy events on camera as they are happening, providing media with immediate coverage of events, and frequently turning a spotlight on situations that might have otherwise gone unreported.

Kerner Commission: Established in 1967 by President Lyndon Johnson, the Kerner Commission was established to address issues raised by the civil rights commission and the race riots plaguing many areas of the United States. Chaired by Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois, the commission reported that two separate and highly segregated societies existed in the United States and recommended adding racial diversity to newsrooms to enhance both media and public understanding of differences.

#MeToo: On October 15, 2017, actress Alyssa Milano carried a torch lit by activist Tarana Burke by tweeting, “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted, write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.” Within two weeks, the hashtag #MeToo had been used 1.7 million times. On Facebook, there were 12 million MeToo posts within the first twenty-four hours.

Project Unbolt: A pilot program created by First Media to incorporate new media components into their traditional newspapers by taking such measures as combining coverage with storytelling, improving planning and management, and making newsrooms more mobile. Innovations have included such efforts as blogging, shooting onsite, and establishing video studios and services.

Sexual Harassment: Legally, the term refers to making uninvited and inappropriate remarks or behaving in a sexually inappropriate matter in a workplace or classroom environment. The US Supreme Court has expanded that definition to include creating a hostile environment by failing to protect employees/students from sexual harassment.

Bibliography

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Coffey, A. J. (2013). Representing ourselves: Ethnic representation in America’s television newsrooms. Howard Journal of Communications, 24(2), 154–177. Retrieved March 12, 2019, from EBSCO Online Database Communication and Mass Media Complete. search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=86994617&site=ehost-live

Gallagher, T. (2018). New year means new changes: Publishers, there’s still time to reinvent the newsroom. Editor and Publisher, 151(1), 22–23.

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"Local News Deserts Are Expanding. Here's What We'll Lose." The Washington Post, 30 Nov. 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/interactive/2021/local-news-deserts-expanding/. Accessed 24 Jan. 2025.

O’Donnell, P., L. Zion, and M. Sherwood. (2016). Where do journalists go after newsroom job cuts? Journalism Practice, 10(1), 35–51. Retrieved March 12, 2019, from EBSCO Online Database Communication and Mass Media Complete. search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=110605158&site=ehost-live

O’Sullivan, J., and A. Heinonen. (2008). Old values, new media. Journalism Practice, 2(3), 357–371. Retrieved March 12, 2019, from EBSCO Online Database Communication and Mass Media Complete. search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=34104672&site=ehost-live

Tobitt, Charlotte. "Around 4,000 Journalism Job Cuts Made in UK and US in 2024." Press Gazette, 6 Jan. 2025, pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/journalism-job-cuts-2024/. Accessed 24 Jan. 2025. 

Walker, Mason. "U.S. Newsroom Employment Has Fallen 26% Since 2008." Pew Research Center, 13 July 2021, www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/07/13/u-s-newsroom-employment-has-fallen-26-since-2008. Accessed 24 Jan. 2025.