This blog first appeared on the Future Proof newsletter, so is reproduced here thanks to the generous people who pay to subscribe to that newsletter. Give them a big thumbs up!

What are the trends and currents of the global digital news market today? That’s a question that is almost too big to think about on your own. As a single person, even working in the digital news industry, the scale of contemplating what’s going on across the almost 200 countries that constitute the world is unthinkable. But we need to think it.

In the last couple of weeks, the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford published its digital news report for 2022, which you can read here. The Reuters Institute is one of the few places (outside of this newsletter) doing serious media analysis in the UK. It’s well-funded and able to poll on a global scale, which often throws up interesting data. For their global digital news report, they canvas a vast array of countries using a uniform sample size of about 2,000 participants (closer to 2.5k in the UK, for some reason) which gives a broad, if not comprehensive, response.

Whatever; data geeks can stress out about methodology. I’m going to quickly run you through a handful of the findings from the report that I think are particularly interesting or valuable from the perspective of digital media entrepreneurship and innovation. First up: