Top news sites collectively received 7.5% fewer visits on the Tuesday and Wednesday of the 2024 US election than they did on those days in 2020, data from Similarweb shows.

The Associated Press, Substack and Axios were among the sites with the most growth between the two elections, while Politico, Fox News, The Guardian and The New York Times all lost substantial proportions of their traffic – according to Similarweb.

After aggregator Yahoo.com (130.6 million visits on Tuesday 5 and Wednesday 6 November) CNN was the most-visited news site in the US, drawing 109.1 million clicks. That figure is down 19.4% on the same days in the 2020 election.

The New York Times (62.4 million) was the second most-visited publisher, but its traffic too dropped 36.3%. Fox News, the third most popular publisher on the list, saw traffic drop 46.8% when compared with the 2020 election, the fifth-largest fall among the top 50 most-visited sites.

Among the ten most-visited news sites over election night, Fox was the biggest faller, followed by The New York Times and CNN. The AP (47.6 million visits, up 247.1%) was the biggest gainer, followed by NBC News (44.3 million, up 120.2%) and USA Today (27.7 million, up 70.1%). The rest of the top ten saw single-digit percentage point changes.

The significant declines at the most-visited sites may reflect broader news avoidance trends or the relative speed with which the result of the 2024 election became clear. The 2020 election, in comparison, took days to be called.

Among the broader top 50 election night news sites the fastest grower was Axios, which saw visits grow 291.7% from 1.8 million in 2020 to 7.2 million last week.

Faster growing still was publishing platform Substack (5.1 million, up 423.1%), which hosts publications by numerous journalists and was less than three years old at the time of the last election.

Web culture site The Daily Dot (2.2m, up 287.5%), Al Jazeera (3.3 million, up 204.2%) and People magazine (11.5 million, up 115.5%) also substantially outperformed their 2020 traffic totals.

The biggest fall, on the other hand, was at Politico (8.8 million visits in 2024, down 63.7% from its 2020 total of 24.3 million), followed by Yahoo News (5.4 million, down 54.8%) and Business Insider (4.2 million, down 48.8%). The Guardian (10.6 million, down 45.2%) Google News (11.3 million, down 40.2%) and Breitbart (3.9 million, down 48.5%) were all also significantly hit.

NBC News, Associated Press and climate site The Cooldown saw largest election week traffic surges

Similarweb data also shows that, among the 100 top news sites in the US, NBC News saw the largest week-on-week increase in its web traffic over the week of the election, with visits nearly tripling compared with the week before.

Climate website The Cooldown saw a comparable increase of 209.4% and the AP received 207% more traffic than the previous week.

A handful of sites saw fewer visits the week of the election than the week before, among them Cosmopolitan (down 15.1%), Variety (down 13.2%) and Vogue (down 8%).

The post Top publishers saw less traffic on day of 2024 US election versus 2020 appeared first on Press Gazette.

A British security adviser for Reuters has been killed in an airstrike in Ukraine on Saturday 24 August 2024.

Two journalists for Reuters were also injured, one seriously, in the strike.

A missile struck the Hotel Sapphire where a six-person Reuters team was staying in the city of Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine, the news agency said. The area is in Ukrainian control but near the frontline of fighting with Russia.

Ryan Evans, a 38-year-old Army veteran from Wrexham in Wales, had four children, the youngest of which was 18 months old. His wife described him as a “gentle giant”.

Evans had been working for Reuters since 2022 including on other Ukraine reporting trips, in Israel close to the border with Gaza, and during the Paris Olympics.

Reuters said in a statement it was “devastated” by the loss.

“We are urgently seeking more information about the attack, including by working with the authorities in Kramatorsk, and we are supporting our colleagues and their families. We send our deepest condolences and thoughts to Ryan’s family and loved ones.

“Ryan has helped keep so many of our journalists safe as they covered events around the world. He was a dear colleague and friend, and we will miss him terribly.”

Reuters said on Monday that its Ukrainian video journalist Ivan Lyubysh-Kirdey, 40, remained in a critical condition after the attack.

Ukraine correspondent Daniel Peleschuk, an American journalist for Reuters who was also injured, has been discharged from hospital.

The three other Reuters members of staff present at the hotel for the attack are safe and accounted for.

In a conference call with reporters a Kremlin spokesperson did not address whether the hotel was targeted but said Moscow only struck military infrastructure or places “related to military infrastructure in one way or another”, Reuters reported.

British Foreign Secretary David Lammy said he was “deeply saddened” by the death of Evans while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky  said of the attack: “A regular city hotel was destroyed by a Russian Iskander missile. Absolutely purposefully, in a thought-out way.”

Jeanne Cavelier, head of the Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk at Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontieres), said: “RSF condemns the death of Reuters security advisor Ryan Evans and is concerned about the health of his two journalist colleagues – one of whom is in a serious condition – who were injured by the same Russian missile strike. Our thoughts are with the victims and their families.

“At this stage, we do not know whether the hotel was targeted because of the presence of the media. One thing is certain: since the beginning of the war, the Russian army has been deliberately attacking journalists and their crews to prevent them from reporting, in violation of international law. RSF is calling for a thorough investigation to identify and prosecute those responsible.”

Scroll down or click here for coverage of other journalists killed or injured in Ukraine since 24 February 2022:

• AFP journalist Arman Soldin killed
• La Repubblica fixer Bohdan Bitik
• Reuters journalists injured and driver killed
• Frédéric Leclerc-Imhoff
• Vira Hyrych
• Mantas Kvedaravicius
• Ukrainian photojournalist Maks Levin
• Oksana Baulina
• Fox News cameraman killed and presenter seriously injured
• Brent Renaud
• Oleg Baturin kidnapped
• Guillaume Briquet was wounded and hospitalised
• Alaraby TV journalists under fire
• Ukrainian news cameraman Yevhenii Sakun
• Sky’s Stuart Ramsay wounded in ambush
• Danish journalists shot

Journalists attacked in Ukraine:

10/5/23: AFP journalist Arman Soldin has been killed by a rocket strike in eastern Ukraine, the news agency announced on Tuesday night (9 May 2023).

Soldin was reporting with four AFP colleagues from the town of Chasiv Yar, close to Bakhmut – the epicentre of fighting in eastern Ukraine for several months. The rest of the team were unhurt.

The 32-year-old was part of the first AFP team to be posted in Ukraine when the war began, and he was later appointed Ukraine video coordinator based in Kyiv in September, a role that included leading coverage and travelling to frontlines himself.

AFP chairman Fabrice Fries said: “The whole agency is devastated by the loss of Arman. His death is a terrible reminder of the risks and dangers faced by journalists every day covering the conflict in Ukraine.”

AFP’s Europe director Christine Buhagiar described him as ‘‘enthusiastic, energetic and brave’’, adding: ‘‘He was a real on-the-ground reporter, always ready to work even in the most difficult places. He was totally devoted to his craft.’’

Soldin is believed to be at least the tenth journalist killed reporting on the war in Ukraine, one of more than 12,000 accredited journalists who have covered the conflict.

26/4/23: Two journalists working for the Italian newspaper La Repubblica came under fire on 26 while reporting near the Antonivskiy Bridge on the outskirts of Kherson, in southern Ukraine – the IFJ reports. A Ukrainian journalist working as a fixer, Bohdan Bitik, was shot dead and his Italian colleague, Corrado Zunino, was wounded in the shoulder.

22/6/22: Reporters Without Borders has concluded that photojournalist Maks Levin was likely executed by Russian troops.

The press freedom group reports that Levin entered a Russian-occupied forest near Kyiv to retrieve his drone when he was killed on 13 March.

It found the place where he died and reports: “Levin’s charred Ford Maverick was still there. RSF found several bullets at the scene, along with the identity papers of Chernyshov, the soldier who was with Levin, and identified 14 bullet impacts in his car. Several items with possible DNA traces attesting to the presence of Russian soldiers very close to the spot where Levin and Chernyshov were killed were also identified by RSF and some of them were taken. In a final search phase initiated by RSF, metal detectors located a bullet that had probably struck Levin.”

6/6/2022:

Two Reuters journalists have been injured, and their driver killed, as their vehicle came under fire from Russian forces as they travelled towards the eastern Ukrainian city of Sievierodonetsk.

The news agency reported that its photographer Alexander Ermochenko and cameraman Pavel Klimov respectively sustained a small shrapnel wound and an arm fracture and were treated in hospital.

Reuters said it did not immediately know the identity of the driver as he and the car they were in had been provided by Russian-backed separatists for the journalists’ reporting trip. The incident took place on a Russian-held part of the road.

31/5/22:

French journalist Frédéric Leclerc-Imhoff has been killed in eastern Ukraine while covering the civilian evacuation.

Leclerc-Imhoff, 32, was killed by shell shrapnel which pierced the armoured vehicle he was travelling in, according to the BBC. Earlier reports, prompted by a tweet by French president Emmanuel Macron and which were carried by Press Gazette, had said Leclerc-Imhoff had been shot on board a humanitarian bus.

Leclerc-Imhoff reported for French news channel BFMTV. According to Sky the regional governor of Luhansk wrote on Telegram that Leclerc-Imhoff suffered a “fatal wound to the neck” while “making material about the evacuation”.

The BBC reports Leclerc-Imhoff’s colleague Maxime Brandstaetter was also injured, but a Ukrainian journalist travelling with the pair was unharmed.

29/4/22:

Vira Hyrych, a Ukrainian journalist for international news service Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, was killed in a Russian missile attack on Kyiv on Thursday 28 April.

The Institute of Mass Information said a rocket had hit her apartment. Her death brings the journalist death toll to at least eight since the invasion of Ukraine began on 24 February.

Hyrych joined Radio Svoboda (Liberty) in February 2018 after working for Ukrainian TV channels. The outlet said: “The editorial staff of Radio Svoboda expresses its condolences to the family of Vira Girich and will remember her as a bright and kind person, a true professional.”

One of Hyrych’s colleagues, Mike Eckel, described her as “one of the nicest people in our bureau; patient, diligent, kind, and dedicated”.

7/4/22: Fox News correspondent Benjamin Hall has revealed the extent of his injuries for the first time, three weeks after an attack that killed two of his colleagues.

The British journalist, 39, said he felt “damn lucky” to have survived the shelling attack by Russian forces that killed cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski and producer Oleksandra Kuvshynova.

Hall wrote on Twitter: “It’s been over three weeks since the attack in Ukraine and I wanted to start sharing it all. But first I need to pay tribute to my colleagues Pierre and Sasha who didn’t make it that day.

“Pierre and I travelled the world together, working was his joy and his joy was infectious. RIP.”

Sharing a picture of himself bandaged and wearing an eye patch he added: “To sum it up, I’ve lost half a leg on one side and a foot on the other.

“One hand is being put together, one eye is no longer working, and my hearing is pretty blown… but all in all I feel pretty damn lucky to be here – and it is the people who got me here who are amazing.”

4/4/22: Lithuanian documentary filmmaker Mantas Kvedaravicius was killed by Russian forces while trying to leave Mariupol, according to Reuters in a report citing the Ukrainian Defence Ministry.

His death means seven journalists have been killed during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Kvedaravicius was shot “with a camera in his hands” according to a colleague in the besieged port city that has become one of the most violent centres of fighting in Ukraine.

Kvedaravicius was known for creating the 2016 conflict-zone documentary “Mariupolis”, which premiered at the 2016 Berlin International Film Festival and covered life in the city, as well as the 2011 film Barzakh.

The latter covered life in Chechnya, a region where the Russian military fought two brutal wars quashing rebellions during the 1990s and 2000s, and was awarded a prize at the Berlin International Film Festival by Amnesty International.

“We lost a creator well-known in Lithuania and in the whole world who, until the very last moment, in spite of the danger, worked in Russia-occupied Ukraine,” Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda said.

“Mantas Kvedaravicius was murdered today [3 April] in Mariupol, with a camera in his hands, in this shitty war of evil, against the whole world,” added Russian film director Vitaly Mansky, founder of the Artdocfest festival which Kvedaravicius had participated in.

4/4/22: Maks Levin, a well-known Ukrainian photojournalist, has become the sixth journalist to be killed in Ukraine since the Russian invasion began.

Levin, who had worked with outlets including Reuters, the BBC and AP, had been missing since mid-March but his body was found in a village to the north of Kyiv on Friday (1 April).

The Ukrainian prosecutor’s office said in a statement that preliminary information indicated he had been killed “in two small arms fires” by Russian armed forces.

Levin, who was married with four young sons, was reportedly travelling with a serviceman and ex-photographer whose condition is still unknown.

Levin worked with the Ukrainian news site LB.ua (Left Bank) for more than a decade. Its editor-in-chief wrote that two days before the war began, he told her: “The war is about to begin. I have to be at the very epicentre. The Russians will certainly go to chaos, there will be war crimes, we must document all this, fix it.”

Economist correspondent Oliver Carroll shared one of Levin’s final photos on Twitter:

Russian investigative reporter killed in Kyiv

24/3/22: Russian journalist Oksana Baulina was killed by shelling on Wednesday (23 March) while filming from a Kyiv shopping centre. She is the fifth journalist to have died during the invasion of Ukraine.

Baulina was reporting for The Insider, an independent Russian news outlet. Her last report can be read here.

Prior to The Insider, Baulina had worked for opposition leader Alexander Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. She left Russia in 2021, according to The Guardian.

Earlier, on Monday 21 March, kidnapped Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna was released by Russian forces. A video of Roshchyna saying that the Russian military “saved her life” was real, said her employer Hromadske, but filmed as a condition of her release.

AP journalist on filing from Mariupol

21/3/22: Two AP journalists were put on a Russian “hit list” for their reporting as the last international journalists in the besieged eastern Ukraine city of Mariupol.

Video journalist Mstyslav Chernov and photographer Evgeniy Maloletka reported from the city for more than two weeks before Ukrainian soldiers arrived to get them out.

Chernov has explained why those who had been pleading with them to stay and tell the world about what was happening began to urge them to leave. They were told by a policeman: “If they catch you, they will get you on camera and they will make you say that everything you filmed is a lie. All your efforts and everything you have done in Mariupol will be in vain.”

The journalists also later found out about a “growing Russian disinformation campaign to discredit our work”.

In addition, Victoria Roshchyna, a journalist for Ukrainian digital TV station Hromadske who had been reporting from Eastern and Southern Ukraine, has been missing for more than a week and it is feared she may be being held hostage by Russian forces.

Another Ukrainian journalist who was kidnapped, Oleg Baturin, was reportedly “beaten, threatened with death, without water and food” for eight days but was released on Sunday 20 March. He had been reporting for the Novy Den newspaper.

Fox News journalists killed and injured

16/3/22: Two journalists working for Fox News have been killed and a correspondent injured and hospitalised while working just outside Kyiv in the latest of a series of incidents where journalists have been attacked in Ukraine.

Veteran Fox News cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski, 55, died after his vehicle came under fire in Horenka.

Ukrainian journalist Oleksandra Kuvshynova, known as Sasha, was killed in the same incident. Fox News said the 24-year-old was “serving as a consultant, helping crews navigate Kyiv and the surrounding area while gathering information and speaking to sources”.

Fox News State Department correspondent Benjamin Hall, who was in the same vehicle, was seriously injured and hospitalised. Fox News said on Wednesday he had been able to travel out of Ukraine, was “alert and in good spirits” and “being treated with the best possible care in the world”.

Fox News Media chief executive Suzanne Scott said on Tuesday: “It is with great sadness and a heavy heart that we share the news this morning regarding our beloved cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski.

“Pierre was a war zone photographer who covered nearly every international story for Fox News from Iraq to Afghanistan to Syria during his long tenure with us. His passion and talent as a journalist were unmatched.”

Of Kuvshynova, Scott later said: “She was incredibly talented and spent weeks working directly with our entire team there, operating around the clock to make sure the world knew what was happening in her country.”

Fox News president and executive editor Jay Wallace added that Zakrzewski was a “constant in all of our international coverage” and had a “positive spirit, boundless energy and eye for the story”.

Hall is originally from the UK, has three young daughters, and has worked for Fox since 2015.

Of Hall, Scott said on Monday: “Earlier today, our correspondent Benjamin Hall was injured while newsgathering outside of Kyiv in Ukraine. We have a minimal level of details right now, but Ben is hospitalised and our teams on the ground are working to gather additional information as the situation quickly unfolds.”

Other Fox journalists remain in Ukraine. Scott said: “The safety of our entire team of journalists in Ukraine and the surrounding regions is our top priority and of the utmost importance. This is a stark reminder for all journalists who are putting their lives on the line every day to deliver the news from a war zone.”

US journalist Brent Renaud killed

News of Hall’s injury came a day after another US journalist, Brent Renaud, was shot and killed in the outskirts of Kyiv.

Brent Renaud, who had been reporting for Time and who previously worked for The New York Times, was shot dead on Sunday in the town of Irpin, on the north-western outskirts of the Ukrainian capital.

The BBC reported that two other journalists were injured in the incident, which was attributed to Russian forces by Kyiv police chief Andriy Nebytov. Renaud’s death is the first recorded killing of a foreign journalist during the war.

One of the journalists injured alongside Renaud, photographer Juan Arredondo, reported that they had been spending the day filming refugees fleeing the town that has become a frontline in the Russian assault on Kyiv.

After driving through a checkpoint, Arredondo said guards started shooting at the car the journalists were travelling in, injuring him and killing Renaud.

Time editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal and president Ian Orefice said: “We are devastated by the loss of Brent Renaud. As an award-winning filmmaker and journalist, Brent tackled the toughest stories around the world often alongside his brother Craig Renaud.

“In recent weeks, Brent was in the region working on a Time Studios project focused on the global refugee crisis. Our hearts are with all of Brent’s loved ones. It is essential that journalists are able to safely cover this ongoing invasion and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine.”

Ukrainian journalist missing

Ukrainian journalist Oleg Baturin has disappeared in Kakhovka, a city in Kherson region of Ukraine, according to the European Federation of Journalists.

Baturin, a journalist for the Novy Den newspaper, reportedly left his home at 4pm on 12 March planning to meet a friend at a nearby bus station. He promised to return in 20 minutes, but has not been seen since.

It is suspected that Baturin may have been the victim of an alleged kidnapping by Russian forces in the region, according to reports by The Ukrainian Independent Information Agency.

Swiss journalist wounded

Swiss journalist Guillaume Briquet was wounded and hospitalised on Sunday 6 March after Russian soldiers fired on his car marked PRESS. They reportedly confiscated his passport, 3,000 Euros in cash and his laptop, according to Ukraine-based news outlet Hromadske.

Briquet later told Reporters Without Borders: “They were less than 50 metres away. They clearly shot to kill. If I hadn’t ducked, I would have been hit. I’ve been fired on before in other war zones, but I’ve never seen this. Journalists traveling around the country with no war experience are in mortal danger.”

According to RSF, he was injured in the face and arm by glass splinters from his windshield, and bullets came within centimetres of his head.

Jeanne Cavelier, the head of RSF’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk, said: “As this incident clearly illustrates, reporters in the field are targets for belligerents despite all the rules protecting journalists. They are civilians, who are keeping the world informed about the progress of the fighting. They must be able to work safely.

“We therefore call on all parties to the conflict to immediately commit to protecting journalists in the field in accordance with international law. We also recommend that journalists exercise the utmost caution in the light of the many attacks by Russian commandos sent ahead as scouts.”

Alaraby TV journalists under fire

A crew for London-based Arab TV channel Alaraby TV came under fire on Sunday 6 March.

Reporter Adnan Can and cameraman Habib Demirci were shot at in their car in a Kyiv suburb despite the vehicle having a white flag and “press” signs attached to it. The pair then hid with residents while fighting was taking place according to The New Arab, which is part of the same media network.

Cameraman killed in attack on Ukraine TV transmitter

On Tuesday, 1 March, Ukrainian news cameraman Yevhenii Sakun was killed when Russian forces shelled a television tower in Kyiv.

Sakun, 49, had been covering the Russian invasion for the Ukrainian TV station LIVE. Four others are believed to have died in that attack.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, TV broadcast towers have been shelled in other Ukrainian cities.

Sky’s Stuart Ramsay wounded in ambush

Sky News chief correspondent Stuart Ramsay has revealed how he was badly wounded in an ambush outside Kyiv – one of a number of journalists attacked in Ukraine.

The incident occurred on Monday, 28 February, but only came to light several days later following the escape of his Sky team from the country. He was replaced in Kyiv by Sky News special correspondent Alex Crawford.

Writing in the Daily Mail Ramsay explained how the Sky team’s rental Hyundai saloon was hit with up to 1,000 bullets in a targeted attack that continued despite their shouts of “journalist”.

Producer Dominique van Heerden was also in the car as well as cameraman Richie Mockler (who continued filming throughout the attack), producer Martin Vowles and translator Andrii Lytvynenko.

The five managed to scramble away from the car and down a nearby embankment from where they walked to an industrial building.

Ramsay was shot in the upper leg with the bullet wound exiting through his lower back but missing his vital organs.

He said the car was “absolutely shredded” by bullets.

That night the Sky team was rescued by local police, with the local police chief hosting them in his own home

Ramsay believes he was ambushed by a Russian reconnaissance unit.

He said: “The Russians whom we never saw were not fighting a war against uniformed foes in armoured vehicles — but attempting to kill unarmed journalists operating in a standard saloon car in cold blood.”

Ramsay said he plans to return to Kyiv when he has recovered to “bear witness to what I fear is an unspeakable looming catastrophe for the brave people of Ukraine”.

Danish journalists shot

On 26 February, two journalists from the Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet were shot while reporting near the eastern Ukrainian city of Ohtyrka.

Unidentified attackers reportedly fired multiple times at reporter Stefan Weichart (who was wounded in the shoulder) and photographer Emil Filtenborg (who was wounded in the legs and back). The pair were clearly identified as journalists on their protective equipment and shouted “press” during the attack. They were able to make their own escape and are expected to recover.

Journalists remain in Ukraine

Hundreds of foreign reporters remain in Kyiv and Ukraine including at least 50 UK journalists.

There is also a large presence of US journalists reporting from Ukraine.

Pictures L-R: PA Wire/Damien Storan and Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Peabody Awards

The post Journalists under attack in Ukraine: Reuters security adviser killed and journalists injured appeared first on Press Gazette.

Press Gazette has ranked the biggest UK and US news publishers on Instagram with four achieving follower-counts above ten million.

We looked at the news publishers from our top 50 UK and US website rankings to compile our new research.

Two publishers – BBC News (27.8 million) and CNN (20 million) – are above the 20 million mark. When Press Gazette last ranked publisher Instagram accounts (in June 2023) BBC News had 7.4m followers on the platform and CNN 4.2m.

The top two on Instagram are followed by the New York Times (18.2 million) and People (13.6 million).

In comparison, only one news publisher (Daily Mail) from the two top 50 lists has topped ten million on Tiktok, the newer platform.

Ladbible does not feature in the latest ranking because it has it has fallen out of the list of the top 50 news websites in the UK. It currently has 14.1 million followers to its biggest Instagram account. Cosmopolitan, The Daily Wire, The Verge, NME, Epoch Times and Gateway Pundit similarly have fallen out of our top 50s so do not eapp

Excluding the impact of Ladbible’s removal, the top seven remain the same – but The Guardian (5.8 million followers) in eighth place has overtaken Buzzfeed and Unilad (both 5.7 million).

The fastest-growing Instagram account over a two-year period was the New York Post, increasing by 74.7% since 2022 to 1.2 million.

It was followed by Healthline Media (up 60% since 2022 to 1.3 million) and UK tabloid the Mirror (up 57% to 441,000).

Four news publishers on our list saw their Instagram followings decline since June 2023: Buzzfeed (down 7%), sister publication Huffpost (3% to 3.2 million), Unilad (down 2%) and The Daily Beast (down 2% to 452,000).

Since June 2023 only, the Mirror was the fastest-growing (up 45%) followed by ITV News (up 34% to 512,000) and the New York Post (up 32%).

But the follower count for BBC News increased the most in absolute terms (2.1 million) since last year - almost double the next largest growth seen by Fox News (up 1.2 million to 9.4 million).

Four added at least one million followers to their counts - also including the New York Times and People.

The percentage of people saying they use Instagram for news has risen from 2% in 2014 to 15% this year in 12 key markets surveyed by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (UK, US, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Finland, Japan, Australia, Brazil and Ireland.

It remains behind Facebook, Youtube and Whatsapp in importance but has overtaken Twitter/X and is still ahead of Tiktok and Snapchat.

The post Two news publishers have 20m+ Instagram followers: Leading UK and US titles ranked appeared first on Press Gazette.

News consumers across the world are increasingly far more likely to access news via social media than they are by directly accessing publisher websites and apps.

The 2024 Reuters Digital News Report surveyed news consumers in 47 leading markets around the world with over 2,000 respondents in each territory (big exclusions included China and Russia).

Across all leading global media markets, social media is the main gateway to news for 29% of people (up from 23% six years ago, but slightly down compared with last year).

Search (dominated by Google) remains important, with 25% citing this as their main access point to news, compared to 24% in 2018.

There has been a sharp decline in the proportion saying that direct access to publisher websites and apps is their main access point for news, down from 32% six years ago to 22% in the latest survey.

Looking at UK sources of news, social media is now cited by 37% of respondents as the main way they came across news in the last week versus 14% for print. TV has declined from 79% to 50% over the last decade.

In the UK there has been a sharp fall in the number of 18 to 24 year-olds accessing news websites or apps directly, from 53% to 25% over the last decade.

The fall amongst 25 to 34 year-olds has been less sharp, down from 53% to 34%. For those aged 35 and above, publisher websites and apps have remained important, with 51% saying they used them over the last week, a figure which has remained level.

Looking at 11 leading media economies, the survey asked which social media networks people have used to access news over the last week.

Facebook remains the most popular source of news, but it has declined from 36% in 2014 citing it to 26% in the latest survey.

Youtube has grown from 16% to 22%, Whatsapp is up from 7% to 16% and Instagram is up from 2% to 15%. Twitter/X is steady on around 11% and Tiktok has grown sharply after emerging four years ago to be used by 8% for accessing news.

Looking at particular newsbrands and sources of news, the survey underlines the dominance of the BBC over the UK media scene. The BBC is also the only UK brand cited by a significant number of US survey respondents as a source they access on at least a weekly basis.

Looking at TV/radio/print, the BBC is twice as popular (48%) as second-placed ITV News. Looking at online it is nearly three times as likely to be cited (44%) as the second-placed Guardian website.

In the US, opinionated right of centre brand Fox News is the most likely to be cited as a weekly source for both online and looking at just TV/radio/print. Overall, US newsbrands are far more evenly split in terms of popularity.

The report found that in the UK mainstream news brands are most likely to be cited as a source of news by social media users, versus alternative news outlets and influencers.

Online native brand Politics Joe made the top five most-referenced outlets in the UK survey behind legacy brands BBC News, Sky News, The Guardian and ITV News.

When survey respondents to ask individual news accounts they pay attention to for news on social media, partisan and outspoken voices dominated and in both the UK and US all the named social media accounts cited by survey respondents were men.

See more on this phenomenon of “news influencers” from Digital News Report author Nic Newman here.

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News publisher rating company Newsguard has downgraded its credibility score for The New York Times, removing the perfect rating the title held since Newsguard first launched in 2018.

GB News and the Daily Star have also lost points and others – including Fox News, MSNBC and Mail Online – have had their previous drops reaffirmed.

GB News told Press Gazette that Newsguard is a “commercial outfit seeking to profit from self-created criteria and wholly untested methods”.

Following the New York Times ratings update, Press Gazette looked at a selection of 84 leading English language news websites and found nearly half have perfect scores and three-quarters had a score above 80 out of the maximum 100.

Seven of the 84 websites had scores below 60, which Newsguard previously used as the minimum passing score to be considered a generally credible publisher.

Newsguard markets its database of ratings to advertisers, tech platforms and internet service providers, and in theory those customers could use the scores to decide, for example, which sites to place programmatic adverts on or surface in news feeds. But it is unknown how many customers Newsguard has or who they are.

US-based Newsguard says it employs a team of journalists to rate publishers on credibility and transparency (full criteria here).

Disclosure: the author of this article worked for Newsguard between 2018 and 2021, and wrote earlier versions of some of the reviews covered.

The New York Times’ Newsguard score: 87.5 out of 100

The New York Times’ review was updated at the start of February to remove its passing grade on the “handles the difference between news and opinion responsibly” criterion, which is worth 12.5 out of the 100 points.

Newsguard said that “derision of Trump courses through basic news stories” on the NYT website, citing as an example a January story which it said “reads like an editorial”.

The news article in dispute said: “Trump’s strategy aims to upend a world in which he has publicly called for suspending the Constitution, vowed to turn political opponents into legal targets and suggested that the nation’s top military general should be executed.”

Similarly, Newsguard noted that an August news story on former Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said he had “harnessed his populist bravado while frequently and unapologetically contorting the truth for political gain”.

The downgrade brings The New York Times’ review more in line with that of CNN, which Newsguard previously ruled also “frequently includes unlabelled opinion in news articles and video clips that appear alongside straightforward news clips”.

The Washington Post, another major liberal-leaning title, retains its perfect Newsguard score but was last reviewed in May 2023.

Other sites Newsguard says fail the news and opinion criterion include the Daily Mirror, The Daily Beast and Huffpost. All three have overall scores of 87.5, like the NYT.

A spokesperson for the NYT said: “The Times’s standards and journalistic processes are the most robust and rigorous of any news organisation in the country. Our news and opinion coverage are now, and have always been, clearly presented as distinct and serving different purposes for our audience.”

GB News: 64.5

In late December Newsguard updated its review for GBNews.com to say it fails the “gathers and presents information responsibly” criterion, pointing to the publication of “false claims on important topics including Covid-19 vaccines and climate change”.

The criterion is worth 18 out of the 100 total points, the most of any after “does not repeatedly publish false or egregiously misleading content”, which is worth 22.

Newsguard picked out as an example an August article by Laurence Fox – who has since been fired from GB News – that described climate change as a “confected crisis” and said “we should reject” the claim “that mankind is the reason for any change in climate”.

Newsguard also queried a May 2023 story which apparently inaccurately reported that American retailer Target was selling a type of swimwear intended for transgender people to children. The apparel, known as “tuck-friendly” swimwear, has extra material to help transgender women deemphasise their genitals.

Newsguard said “Target is not selling ‘tuck-friendly’ swimwear for children and it never did so, according to a company spokesperson and a Newsguard review of the retailer’s apparel on its site”, adding that the store has carried such swimwear previously for adults.

The credibility rater also decided that, like The New York Times, GB News does not responsibly handle the separation of news and opinion. Whereas the NYT lost those points because it includes opinionated statements in articles labelled as news, Newsguard said GB News fails because it “consistently approaches coverage from an undisclosed right-leaning perspective”.

Newsguard noted that the GB News editorial charter states it is “balanced and fair in our coverage”. Newsguard said this was at odds with the broadcaster’s practice of employing serving Conservative politicians and the general tenor of its coverage.

GB News does not appear to have ever given Newsguard a formal response and a channel spokesperson told Press Gazette last week this would continue to be the case.

“Newsguard is a commercial, for-profit organisation whose business model is to act as the self-appointed arbiter of news accuracy on the internet,” the spokesperson said. “It has an opaque scoring process and claims it reviews a sample of output to make its judgements but does not disclose what this is.

“While it rates GB News as ‘credible’, NewsGuard nonetheless makes grossly untrue generalisations about our news gathering operation which do not reflect the high standards we set ourselves and our journalists. We answer to the law and our audience, not to commercial outfits seeking to profit from self-created criteria and wholly untested methods.

“We do not respond to queries from NewsGuard and we are not alone: many other major UK news organisations take the same approach. We made one exception recently to correct NewsGuard on a clear factual inaccuracy in a claim they made about us.

“GB News has broadcast almost 20,000 hours of news, opinion and debate since launch, and published more than 50,000 original articles on our news website. We will not be judged on this by an unregulated outfit that seeks to justify its existence and make money by appointing itself as some sort of guardian of the internet.”

Daily Star: 69.5

Newsguard says the Reach-owned Daily Star “frequently” publishes unsubstantiated stories about Vladimir Putin being dead and about the existence of aliens.

“Between October and November 2023, the site published more than 20 articles repeating claims made by the Telegram channel General SVR” about Putin being dead or gravely ill, Newsguard said. “The articles claimed that Putin had died from a heart attack after being severely ill for two years with various illnesses, and that a body double is now standing in for him to keep his death a secret.”

The articles often ended by citing Kremlin denials that Putin is ill, Newsguard said, but “in a manner that gives the countervailing evidence significantly less prominence than the baseless claim”.

Newsguard docked the Daily Star the 18 points associated with “gathering and presenting information responsibly” because of these and other stories, as well as a further 12.5 points for not issuing corrections on the stories under dispute.

Asked about the alien articles last summer, the Star responded by mocking the fact-checkers as “fun sponges” on its front page. When Newsguard approached the publication again in January, the Star’s associate editor Andrew Gilpin responded saying: “1) How do you know Putin is not dead? 2) How do you know aliens don’t exist?”

Mail Online: 64.5

Newsguard and Mail Online have a testy history, with the ratings company declaring the Mail an unreliable news source in 2019 only to reverse course and instead issue it with a low passing grade shortly afterward.

Mail Online’s score does not appear to have improved since, despite multiple reviews. The most recent update was made in October 2023, and says that despite publishing some impactful original reporting, the site has “promoted false claims on important topics including the US migrant crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine”.

Newsguard cited a May 2023 Mail story that connected the eviction of 15 homeless veterans from a New York state hotel to “an influx of migrants” caused by the policies of New York City mayor Eric Adams.

The veterans, Newsguard said, were in fact residents of a nearby homeless shelter who were “coached to appear as homeless veterans”. Ten days after the article was published the Mail added a note at the end acknowledging allegations that the story was a hoax, but “the body of the story was not corrected”, Newsguard said.

The credibility company also pointed to a Mail story covering the same “tuck-friendly” swimwear story over which it rebuked GB News, as well as incorrect stories about the Ukraine war and Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden.

Newsguard failed the Mail on the corrections criterion because of what it described as a common practice of removing inaccuracies without acknowledging them or failing to remove errors at all.

Despite those rulings, Mail Online does meet Newsguard’s standard for splitting news from opinion. The review said that although the site does not disclose a political orientation, “in spite of its reputation as a conservative publication, Mail Online’s politics coverage on any given day rarely betrays an obvious slant”.

Joe.co.uk: 55

Like The New York Times, Newsguard said the website of Joe Media, joe.co.uk, “frequently publishes stories labelled as news that contain opinion”.

However, the site also fails four other criteria that pull its score down to 55, making it the seventh-lowest rated site Press Gazette reviewed.

As well as the opinion and news issues, Newsguard said it only managed to find two corrections the site had published since 2015 and that the site failed to identify its ownership and editors and to clearly label advertising.

The Sun: 69.5

Like The Daily Star, Newsguard docked The Sun points on the “gathering and presenting information responsibly” and corrections criteria.

The rater said in its most recent update in October that The Sun “has published multiple articles that advanced inaccurate claims related to health”, citing two 2023 stories that misreported on government data and a medical study.

Newsguard also rebuked the publisher for its coverage of Putin’s health, which it said had, like the Star, relied on an anonymous Telegram channel for information.

Fox News: 69.5

In July 2022 Newsguard updated Fox News’ rating to say that the site no longer met the standard for “gathering and presenting news responsibly”.

The review was updated in December with new examples upholding that decision, including an October article suggesting Covid-19 vaccines increase the risk of catching the virus and one from November that reported police escorted the “Qanon Shaman” through the US Capitol during the January 2021 insurrection, rather than arresting him.

MSNBC: 49.5

The review for MSNBC, which lost its “gathering and presenting news responsibly” pass shortly after Fox did, has similarly been updated with fresh examples upholding that change.

It cites, for example “six videos that inaccurately described the criminal case against Donald Trump on charges that he improperly handled government documents as an ‘espionage’ case”.

MSNBC has a lower score than Fox because Newsguard says it inadequately distinguishes between news and opinion on the website and does not identify its owners NBCUniversal and Comcast.

Of the sites reviewed by Press Gazette, the only ones to score lower were Chinese stage news agency CGTN (44.5 points), Fox News competitor Newsmax (20), Russian government propaganda outlet RT (20) and The Epoch Times (17.5), a Trump-aligned newspaper produced by adherents of the exiled Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong.

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CNN remains the most-followed English-language news publisher on Youtube, Press Gazette analysis has found.

But right-wing rival Fox News has knocked CNN off the top spot for all-time video views, pulling ahead by some 600 million streams. In our last ranking, in June 2022, Fox was behind CNN by 200 million.

In the past 16 months, seven publishers crossed the one million subscriber mark to enter Press Gazette’s ranking for the first time – including the accounts for opinion-led UK broadcaster GB News and global TalkTV programme Piers Morgan Uncensored.

Gannett-owned USA Today also stands out as a particularly rapid riser, jumping from the 29th most-followed publisher in Press Gazette’s 2022 list to 16th this year.

If you know of an English-language news publisher that has more than one million subscribers on Youtube but does not appear below, let us know at pged@pressgazette.co.uk.

[From June 2022: The biggest English-language news outlets on Youtube and their most popular videos]

The most-followed and most-watched news publishers on Youtube in October 2023

CNN remains the most-followed publisher in Press Gazette’s ranking, boosting its subscriber figures by 12% between June 2022 and October 2023 to 15.7 million. It is followed by the US broadcaster ABC News, which holds second place after growing its subscribers by 15% to 15.2 million.

BBC News also remains static at third place, but has grown faster than CNN and ABC News, boosting subscribers by 21% to 15.1 million.

The major change high up in the ranking comes from Al Jazeera English, which has jumped two spots to fourth place, passing Vox and Fox News.

Although CNN is first for subscribers, it has been overtaken by Fox News as the most-watched publisher on Youtube. Fox saw a 33% increase in its overall view count in the 16 months between June 2022 and October 2023, and now boasts more than 15 billion views for its main Youtube channel. CNN saw growth of 25% over the same period.

Most of the top-ten most-watched Youtube news publishers have maintained the same rank as last year. The highest-ranked exception is Insider (4.9 billion views as of October), which has fallen one spot to seventh as NBC News grew its views by more than 55% to 6.3 billion.

New entrants: Piers Morgan Uncensored and GB News pass 1m subscribers

There are 11 new additions to Press Gazette's ranking in 2023, seven of which passed the one million subscriber mark since the last analysis in June 2022. The remaining four appear to have already had one million subscribers, but were missed in last year's analysis.

The seven newly-qualifying entrants, which passed the one million subscriber mark, are:

• Australia's 9 News
• BBC News Africa
• CBN News, the news service of the Pat Robertson-founded Christian Broadcasting Network
• Canadian network CTV News
• New York local broadcaster Eyewitness News ABC7NY
• Opinion-led UK broadcaster GB News
• Piers Morgan Uncensored, the flagship programme for UK opinion-led broadcaster TalkTV which also airs in the US and Australia.

The other four added to our list are Indian news agency ANI News, English-language Chinese state broadcaster CGTN, Turkish public broadcaster TRT World and DW Documentary, the longform arm of German news agency Deutsche Welle.

GB News passed one million subscribers in September and hit one billion views last week.

The outlet's chief digital officer Geoff Marsh said: "This is astounding growth at record speed and proves GB News is cutting through to the people of the UK – the numbers don’t lie.”

GB News, which launched on TV in June 2021 while its Youtube channel was created four months earlier, claimed in a statement that the figures meant it has become "officially the fastest-growing British news provider ever" on Youtube.

However the account for TalkTV's Piers Morgan Uncensored has put on 800,000 more followers than GB News. Morgan's Youtube channel was created in November 2021 and TalkTV went live in April 2022.

Vox still top for most views per video

Although it has dropped a few spots on the most-subscribed list, Vox remains well ahead of the competition in terms of how many views each of its videos get.

Mona Lalwani, editorial director of Vox's video arm, told Press Gazette last year that much of its success came from its approach to explanatory journalism: "The way that news comes at us is hard and fast and splintered. And I think Vox does a really good job of gluing that information together."

The next-closest publisher for average views, the newly-included DW Documentary, attracted a mean of 756,000 viewers for each of its videos, compared with 2.08 million for Vox.

[Read more: How Vox became world’s top news publisher on Youtube]

USA Today jumps up rankings; Sun, Daily Mail and Telegraph also see big gains

One publisher is first when it comes to both most audience growth and most growth in cumulative views: Gannett-owned USA Today saw a 158.7% increase in its overall Youtube view count between June 2022 and October 2023.

It now has 3.1 billion views, putting it between Vice News (also 3.1 billion) and The Guardian (2.8 billion) in the ranking.

Also seeing substantial views growth were Rupert Murdoch-owned Sky News Australia (up 89.3%), The Sun (85.3%), the UK's Telegraph (61.7%) and the UK's Sky News (61.3%).

On subscriber growth, USA Today rose by 135% to just under five million. It now ranks 16th, behind The Telegraph - itself the second fastest growing publisher for subscribers, up 70% on June 2022.

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Rupert Murdoch is stepping down as chairman of News Corporation and Fox Corporation in November.

The 92-year-old will be appointed the honorary title of chairman emeritus of each company at each of their upcoming annual general meetings of shareholders, and continue to provide some input to both companies.

His son Lachlan Murdoch will become sole chairman of publishing company News Corp and continue in his current roles of executive chair and chief executive officer of broadcasting business Fox Corp.

Lachlan said: “On behalf of the Fox and News Corp boards of directors, leadership teams, and all the shareholders who have benefited from his hard work, I congratulate my father on his remarkable 70-year career.

“We thank him for his vision, his pioneering spirit, his steadfast determination, and the enduring legacy he leaves to the companies he founded and countless people he has impacted.

“We are grateful that he will serve as chairman emeritus and know he will continue to provide valued counsel to both companies.”

Rupert Murdoch ends chairmanship after almost 70 years

Murdoch previously proposed combining News Corp and Fox Corp, but abandoned that at the start of 2023 after deciding it would not be “optimal” for shareholders.

News Corp is a major publisher in the UK, US and Australia with publications including The Sun, The Times, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, The Australian and Sky News Australia.

Murdoch began running the Australian publisher News Ltd in 1954 and has been at the helm of his empire ever since. He entered the UK market in 1969 when he bought The Sun and the now-defunct News of the World, and he expanding into the US four years later.

Rupert Murdoch’s note to staff in full: ‘Our companies are in robust health, as am I’

In a memo to staff, he said: “For my entire professional life, I have been engaged daily with news and ideas, and that will not change. But the time is right for me to take on different roles, knowing that we have truly talented teams and a passionate, principled leader in Lachlan who will become sole chairman of both companies.

“Neither excessive pride nor false humility are admirable qualities. But I am truly proud of what we have achieved collectively through the decades, and I owe much to my colleauges, whose contributions to our success have sometimes been unseen outside the company but are deeply appreciated by me.

“Whether the truck drivers distributing our papers, the cleaners who toil when we have left the office, the assistants who support us or the skilled operators behind the cameras or the computer code, we would be less successful and have less positive impact on society without your day-after-day dedication.

“Our companies are in robust health, as am I. Our opportunities far exceed our commercial challenges. We have every reason to be optimistic about the coming years – I certainly am, and plan to be here to participate in them. But the battle for the freedom of speech and, ultimately, the freedom of thought, has never been more intense.

“My father firmly believed in freedom, and Lachlan is absolutely committed to the cause. Self- serving bureaucracies are seeking to silence those who would question their provenance and purpose. Elites have open contempt for those who are not members of their rarefied class. Most of the media is in cahoots with those elites, peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth.

“In my new role, I can guarantee you that I will be involved every day in the contest of ideas. Our companies are communities, and I will be an active member of our community. I will be watching our broadcasts with a critical eye, reading our newspapers and websites and books with much interest, and reaching out to you with thoughts, ideas, and advice. When I visit your countries and companies, you can expect to see me in the office late on a Friday afternoon.

“I look forward to seeing you wherever you work and whatever your responsibility. And I urge you to make the most of this great opportunity to improve the world we live in.”

Murdoch’s resignation coincides with the release of a new tell-all book by Trump White House chronicler Michael Wolff next week about the “end of the Murdoch empire” and internal battles at Fox News.

News Corp recorded its second highest year of profitability ever in the year to 30 June 2023 with profits of more than $1.4bn and revenues of $9.9bn, of which digital accounted for more than half for the first time. The best-performing part of the company was business publisher Dow Jones, which posted both its highest quarterly profit and highest annual profit.

In the UK, The Sun is “very profitable and growing” at an operating level, according to its publisher Dominic Carter. It recorded pre-tax losses of £127.2m in the year to July 2022, the most recent figures available, but made £15m after one off-costs like legal fees and restructuring. Meanwhile The Times doubled its profits to £73.2m.

Lachlan Murdoch and the succession

Lachlan Murdoch, 52, is Rupert Murdoch’s eldest son and has been chairman and CEO of Fox Corporation since 2019.

During his time in charge of Fox News it broadcast the content which saw it successfully sued for $787.5m by Dominion Voting Systems after broadcasting false conspiracy claims about the 2020 presidential election result being rigged.

Lachlan’s younger brother James, 50, was once considered a potential successor to his father but he resigned from the board of News Corp in 2020 “due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions”.

Murdoch has four other children: Prudence (from his first marriage), Elisabeth (along with James and Lachlan, from his second marriage) and Grace and Chloe (from his third marriage).

Elisabeth is also a successful media executive who sold her Shine production company to News Corp for $663m in 2011.

Murdoch’s legacy

Interviewed by Press Gazette in 2005, Murdoch said his proudest achievement was smashing the power of the UK print unions in 1986/87 when he moved newspaper production from Fleet Street to Wapping.

He said: “We took them on and were the first to do it. And although we were abused by all sorts of people, including leading industrialists, who made portentous lectures on the BBC on how this was not the British way, in fact it was a turning point. An absolute turning point for Fleet Street and the whole of the newspaper industry. But also a turning point, although to a slightly lesser extent, for the whole of British industry.

“Although it wasn’t pleasant, I’m certainly very, very proud of it. And it’ll be part of my legacy.”

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The ten most-visited news websites globally are all experiencing a decline in traffic: this was the year-on-year position in May, as highlighted in the latest Press Gazette ranking.

This worrying insight is a wake-up call for the news industry, signifying the pressure it is under. But it also highlights the opportunity for news outlets to find new audiences.

Attracting more women audiences, who, as reported by Richard Addy in From Outrage to Opportunity, are currently underserved by the industry, seems to be the lowest-hanging fruit. As an example, if newspaper organisations globally increased women’s consumption of news by one percentage point a year, this would generate an additional $11bn over the next five years and $38bn over the next ten.

To understand this growth opportunity presenting itself to the industry, my audience strategy consultancy AKAS used Similarweb data from the last month where demographic data was available to analyse the gender consumption gaps of the most-visited news websites. In other words, we compared visits by men and by women to each of the websites and calculated the difference between them to find out whether there was a gap in favour of either gender.

We found that across the top 48 out of the most visited 53 news websites URLs where data was available in May 2023, 60.1% of visits were made by men, indicating an average gender consumption gap of 20.2 percentage points (ppt). (Data was not available for edition.cnn.com (although it was for cnn.com), news.google.com, news.yahoo.com, finance.yahoo.com or news.sky.com.)

Analysis of a larger sample of 3,174 websites from across the world in May revealed an even larger gender consumption gap of 22 percentage points.

Fox News has biggest opportunity to grow female audience

Seven of the top ten news websites globally have their data disaggregated by gender on Similarweb. All seven have more visits from men.

The consumption gap of 39 percentage points is largest for foxnews.com where 69.5% of all visitors are men and 30.5% are women. Foxnews.com’s consumption gap is the second largest among the top 48 sites (behind only aggregator newsnow.co.uk) and the largest among the 29 generalist news websites in the top 48.

Among the top ten news sites, cnn.com registered the second largest gap of 23.2 percentage points (behind foxnews.com) in favour of men. It was followed by dailymail.com (20.6 ppt), msn.com (20.2 ppt), bbc.com (19 ppt), theguardian.com (16.4 ppt), bbc.co.uk (15.9 ppt) and nytimes.com (9 ppt).

It is important to highlight that the two BBC websites are not solely focused on news, but include other, traditionally women-friendly genres such as entertainment, children’s, comedy and drama (defined by AKAS as News+), which may be suppressing the news gender consumption gap.

Men's higher news consumption most pronounced on politics sites

AKAS also analysed the gender consumption gap by sub-genre by overlaying the news genre onto each of the top news websites. Our analysis revealed that the gap is largest for politics news websites, with a consumption gap in favour of men of 36.2 percentage points, followed by news agency visits (31.1 ppt) and business sites (26.8 ppt). Four of the five sites with the largest consumption gaps between men and women are politics and news agency websites.

Analysis of business news websites reveals similarly high gender consumption gaps, with men again accounting for the majority of the visits on cnbc.com (30.1 ppt difference in favour of men), bloomberg.com (31 ppt) and wsj.com (28.3 ppt)

While conducting research for From Outrage to Opportunity, we found that across our six countries of focus in the global north and south, men dominated the most senior roles in the highest-profile beats. For example, men occupy three in four of the most senior editorial roles in politics and two in three in business/economics.

The stereotypical assignment of editorial roles that confines women editors primarily to the so-called “soft” lower-profile beats may be suppressing women’s consumption of high-profile news genres such as politics, business and foreign affairs.

Globally, women have a higher level of interest than men in 11 out of 16 news genres and lower interest in just five news genres – politics, business, international news, sports and science/technology. Men’s dominance in the most senior editorial roles leads to men’s news interests being overserved and women’s underserved.

Growth opportunity for lifestyle sites is among men

Using Press Gazette’s categorisation, we found that four of the top 48 news websites were more likely to have visits from women than men. Three of these fall within AKAS’ lifestyle category.

Cosmopolitan.com’s visits break down to 61% women vs. 39% men, inverting in favour of women the average gender consumption gap of 22 percentage points across news sites. Similarly, hellomagazine.com’s gender gap of 17.1 percentage points and people.com’s gap of 11.9 ppt are also in favour of women.

The lifestyle genre is typically edited more gender equitably: as reported in The Missing Perspectives of Women in News, according to ICFJ’s global 2019 survey, lifestyle was the only beat out of 19 which had reached gender parity in terms of its journalists. In all other beats, the majority of journalists were men. This more equitable editing has contributed to women’s needs being served better in outlets specialising in lifestyle.

How to attract more female audiences without alienating male audiences?

Many strategic steps are available to news organisations to grow their female audiences. But in my 15-year experience of working in the industry, I have rarely witnessed a news outlet having a strategy for growing its female audience, which undoubtedly is a lost opportunity.

Amedia in Norway is the only outlet that springs to mind and their successful case study has been presented in From Outrage to Opportunity alongside 12 solution themes for making news more gender equitable. Among them, the following could constitute first steps:

• Track women’s engagement and consumption

The first and most important step that most news organisations overlook it to disaggregate audience performance data by gender and track female versus male news consumption and engagement.

Often leadership teams’ underlying assumption is that men’s and women’s news habits are not dissimilar enough to break down. However, they are. And the only way to understand how to serve women and men well is to understand how their needs converge and, crucially, diverge.

• Develop a business plan for increasing revenue from women audiences while retaining men

Decide how to tackle the issue of women’s underrepresentation at every level of the news value chain: at leadership and newsroom level, in newsgathering and news coverage, and in consumption.

Our research shows that the better represented women are at each stage of the news cycle, the bigger the female news audience is.

• Research and develop women-friendly news products and formats

The news industry has defaulted to men’s news habits, needs and consumption patterns for so long that women’s news needs and habits are understood much less well. The scarce research available shows that women can consume news differently.

News outlets that aspire to attracting more women audiences must tailor news propositions to their specific needs.

• Track the success of any women-inclusive news strategy to refine the business plan

News outlets should consider locking in the business plan to grow their female audience at a strategy level to ensure buy-in among both leadership and grassroots journalists. Trailblazing organisations like the BBC, The New York Times, Bloomberg, Amedia and Mint, who have succeeded in improving women’s representation in news coverage and/or news leadership, have highlighted the importance of shared responsibility across the organisation for doing so.

Our research has also highlighted the importance of attaching targets to each element in the business strategy and measuring these. Tracking the performance of the strategy will help to refine its success.

No gain is too small. Drop by drop the river rises.

The post The gender consumption gap for online news and how publishers can address it appeared first on Press Gazette.

The chief executive of Dominion Voting Systems has said the high threshold in the US for proving defamation by a media outlet should remain in place despite his experiences battling Fox News.

Speaking on Wednesday about his landmark libel settlement with Fox News, John Poulos also explained why his voting technology company ultimately decided not to bring the case to trial.

Fox and Dominion agreed to the $787.5m settlement immediately before a trial was due to begin. Dominion alleged Fox defamed the company by repeatedly airing false claims its voting machines artificially swung the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden.

Poulos made his comments during an interview by Globe and Mail editor David Walmsley at the inaugural Sir Harry Summit in London.

The beginning of the interview was delayed by a few moments because of sustained applause from the crowd of several hundred people, most of them media professionals. It was the most rapturous reception of any speakers at the summit – with the exception of Watergate journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein who received a standing ovation towards the end of the day.

interview with dominion voting systems CEO john poulos hasn’t even started and safe to say he appears to have the support of the #sirharrysummit room pic.twitter.com/1FvAhZsK8C

— Bron Maher (@Bron_Maher) May 10, 2023

Poulos told Walmsley the case had been “completely surreal for us” and that litigation “was literally the last thing we could do”.

“We were receiving hundreds of phone calls, most of them death threats, very detailed…

“We wrote letters of retraction… We had sent literally thousands of documents. We had pointed all of the characters that were defaming us to the Attorney General, we had pointed them to the Department of Homeland Security, bipartisan election officials. We pointed them to the fact that we had over 1,000 hand recounts of paper ballots.

“So it was never really about not knowing the truth.”

[Read more: Fox News v Dominion and the biggest libel payouts in history]

To have won its case against Fox, Dominion’s lawyers would have needed to demonstrate not only that Fox aired falsehoods about the company but that it did so knowingly. This requirement to establish “actual malice” was laid down in the landmark New York Times Co v Sullivan Supreme Court case, and makes it extremely difficult to successfully sue a news publisher for libel.

But asked by Walmsley whether he thought NYT v Sullivan set too high of a standard for media defamation cases, Poulos said: “Personally I don’t. I think that the standard should be fairly high.

“I think that we – and this is just my opinion, just one person’s opinion – but I think that we rely on the media to hold our government to account, public officials to account, institutions to account.

“And to make a mistake in the pursuit of the truth, I think, happens. But it’s incumbent on those media institutions to recognise when that happens.”

Poulos also said he was not concerned that the trial would negatively affect First Amendment protections for publishers.

“I’m not a First Amendment scholar by any means. But the First Amendment, from what I know of it, does not give anyone the right to lie, and knowingly lie, and defame people. That’s the whole point of why there’s defamation law.”

Despite the high bar, commentators suggested that Dominion had an unusually strong case against Fox. The judge in the case, Eric M Davis, had already ruled ahead of the trial that Dominion proved the claims under dispute were false.

[Read more: Why a lack of ‘actual malice’ scuppered Sarah Palin’s New York Times libel suit]

‘A protection that I hold dear’

During an earlier session at the Sir Harry Summit discussing the UK’s status as “libel capital of the world”, New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe described the actual malice standard as “a protection that I hold dear”.

The investigative journalist said that “there is a movement afoot to try and overturn the Supreme Court precedent that established the actual actual malice standard.

“There are lawyers who would like to see some [media libel] case make its way up to the Supreme Court. And with the current Supreme Court it’s anyone’s guess how that might work out.”

News UK deputy general counsel Pia Sarma agreed with Radden Keefe, saying “that’s a huge threat”.

“This country looks over there and goes, well, they’ve got this constitutional First Amendment, plus they’ve got New York Times v Sullivan, the great case – and it’s under attack right now in a really serious way.” Sarma separately said the UK remains the “libel capital of the world”.

Why Dominion settled its libel case against Fox News

Poulos said Dominion’s legal fees in the Fox News case ultimately escalated from millions to “tens of millions of dollars a month”, and that on the eve of the trial: “I couldn’t wait for the opening statements.”

But he said the following day his lawyer “slid a piece of paper across” to him “and it had a number on it with a yes or no”.

Poulos said he weighed the effect that a trial “would have on all of my people and our customers”, as well as that the Delaware Superior Court, where the case was being litigated, refused to admit audio or video clips as evidence.

“The judge made that very clear,” Poulos said. “He went even so far as to say that he checked with the Supreme Court in Delaware – it’s never happened.

“So there was no video, which I think a lot of people don’t understand. There wasn’t even going to be rebroadcasting of any of the audio transcript. So really, it was just… the already written record that we had put forward in our court filings.”

Poulos added that he “never really doubted whether or not we would go and get the right verdict…

“It was just a matter of: is the number going to be higher than that or lower than that?”

That $787.5m figure, he said, was just above the valuation of Dominion heading into the 2020 election.

“And ultimately, when I spoke to my partner about it, we just felt that that is a very big price to put on truth in journalism. And it’s probably not a bad precedent.”

Poulos also disclosed that Fox wired Dominion the settlement before he had even left the courthouse.

“That’s when it kind of hit home for me. I put myself in the position of a board seat [at Fox]. You know, they must have been told regular updates on this case for the last two and a half years. And I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when they were called together to approve that wire.”

[Read more from the Sir Harry Summit: Former Fox CEO Barry Diller calls Dominion case a ‘stain’ on Rupert Murdoch’s reputation]

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Barry Diller, the billionaire chairman of US online publisher IAC and Expedia, has joined forces with News Corp and Axel Springer to fight the threat posed to publishers by generative AI.

The Fox Corporation co-founder warned that AI, as deployed by platforms like ChatGPT, poses a similar threat to news publishers as the advent of free online news did in the early years of the commercial internet.

His warning came as Google announced the launch of PaLM 2 AI, its own generative language model, which is an alternative to OpenAI’s ChatCPT.

Speaking at the Sir Harry Evans Summit on investigative journalism in London, Diller said: “It’s a terrible mistake for publishers to allow it [ChatGPT] to suck up every known piece of work that has ever been done.

“Back 20 years ago, when everything was free on the internet, the internet began as a hub of free media.

“In 15 of those years you saw enormous destruction, it took The New York Times to the hour of bankruptcy. Paywalls saved mainstream journalism.

“Right now the same thing is happening… Unless publishers say, ‘You cannot do that until there is a structure in place for publishers to get paid,’ you will see another wave that is maybe even more destructive.”

Later he spoke of his admiration for OpenAI chairman Sam Altman and said that despite the huge investment in his company from the likes of Microsoft, Altman retains the power to “pull the plug” on the technology at any time. “He understands the dangers – you couldn’t make up a better steward.”

Interviewed by conference organiser Tina Brown, Diller was asked about fair usage rules in US and UK copyright law, which may provide a defence for OpenAI from expected legal actions brought by publishers. The company has used millions of professionally-produced news articles, including information held behind paywalls, to train ChatGPT and allow it to answer users’ questions without reference to the source material.

Diller said: “The basis for fair use [in copyright law] has to be redefined. You can’t have fair use when there is an unfair machine that knows no bounds.”

And he revealed that his company is working with News Corp and Axel Springer to challenge ChatGPT and others that are exploiting copyrighted news content without permission or recompense.

He said: “We are leading a group really that’s going to say we are going to change the copyright law if necessary, we are going to say to you cannot take our material or we will litigate. We are going to be very active. What you can do is say what you publish you have a right to control.”

Powerpoint ‘insidious’: Decisions should be instinctive

Asked to share some insights into his success as a businessman, Diller said: “I’ve got two things going for me: I’m curious and I don’t want to know too much.”

He warned that Powerpoint presentations are “an insidious force” in business.

And he said: “I believe these decisions are mostly instinctive. Is it a good idea? If you actually start doing projections, and define what the size of the TAM, which is the total market size, and your position in it and all this drivel, you really do get misled. I always thought that editorial choices between A and B are binary and instinctive.”

He added: “The more the odds are against you the better chance you have, because it means less people are trying to compete with you.”

Asked how business leaders can retain talent, he said: “Hiring for senior positions outside your own company is a true failure. The best thing you can do is find people who have some spark and energy and hopefully a little edge at the earliest point, they can have almost no experience, and drop them in over their head in the water.

“They will struggle a little bit and they will surprisingly often learn to navigate to the other side and grow in your organisation in the sensibility of the company that you want to have. That is how you get people to grow.

“I do want doctors that have experience, but in the narrative world, experience is worth nothing.”

Dominion case a stain on the reputation of Rupert Murdoch

Diller was chairman and CEO of Fox Inc from 1984 to 1992, working closely with Rupert Murdoch on the successful creation of America’s fourth major national broadcast TV network.

Diller was asked by Brown about Murdoch and the decision by Fox News to pay $787m in defamation damages to voting machines company Dominion for knowingly misleading viewers.

Diller said that Murdoch’s entrepreneurship and willingness to gamble his entire company to build new products, as he did with Sky in the UK in the 1980s, was inspiring.

But he added: “The tragedy of Rupert is he is going to be known for what happened at Fox News. For allowing those commentators to do what they did, to pour that kind of divisiveness consistently is a poison, which is pretty unfortunate, which is going to stain his reputation forever.

“It’s hard because I’m fond of Rupert, but he and his son – maybe more than Rupert – have poisoned the atmosphere and that’s a bad place…

“He is the sun king, and when the sun shines for the sun king you can’t have a better atmosphere.

“There are wonderful parts of Rupert. The joyousness with which he fights establishments and fights to establish new things, many of them very good. When I said [in 1985] I thought working on a fourth network was a good idea he slapped his hand on his thigh and said let’s go.

“I said we’ve got to buy these stations, he said: ‘Great, go do it.’ A week later we had a deal to buy the backbone of the original Fox.”

Asked about Diller’s comments a Fox News spokesperson said: “For more than 21 years, Fox News Channel has been cable news’ most-watched network in all categories with more Democrats, Independents and Republicans now tuning in than either CNN or MSNBC.”

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