Foreword to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2013

This is the second in what we hope will be an annual series of reports that tracks the transition of the news industry towards an increasingly digital and multi-platform future. This year’s report provides compelling evidence about the growing number of ways of consuming news and, in particular, the speeding up of the mobile and tablet revolution. It also documents the ways in which people are paying for news, the growing number of locations where they access the news, and brings new data about the trust and credibility of different news sources as well as attitudes to partial or impartial news.

But there are many other fascinating insights that have emerged from our unique survey of the news habits within nine countries. We have expanded our focus to include Japan, Brazil,¹ Italy, and Spain – in addition to the five countries (US, UK, France, Germany, and Denmark) that provided the basis of last year’s survey and we’ve asked more questions in all countries on the key issues.

Once again we combined these data with a series of essays, which add depth and context to the findings, and these have been strengthened by academic partnerships with the Hans Bredow Institute in Hamburg, the School of Journalism at the Institute of Political Science in Paris, and the Centre for Power, Media and Communication at Roskilde University, Denmark.

Many of our academic partners are also organising events or country reports looking in more details at national themes – and adding wider value to this international project.

To that end we have also taken more effort to open up all of the data this year. A new website (www.digitalnewsreport.org) contains slidepacks, charts, and raw data tables, along with a license that encourages reuse. The website – which is optimised for mobile and tablet devices – will also carry links to non-English-language versions and build over time as a resource for further research. Over time, we believe this will build into an invaluable resource for academics and news organisations to explain the past as well as the future. A description of the methodology is available along with the complete questionnaire.

Making all this possible, we are hugely grateful to our sponsors this year, which include Google, BBC, Ofcom, France Télévisions, Newsworks, as well as the Hans Bredow Institute and Roskilde University.

I am also grateful to YouGov, our polling company, who did everything possible to accommodate our complex requirements and helped our research team analyse and contextualise the data.