The future of news: impartiality, trust and technology

There are powerful economic, democratic and foreign policy arguments for supporting the future of honest, accurate and informative news. Although the value of news is clear, its prospects are not. The Government’s task is to establish the conditions that enable UK media to stand on its own feet and ensure that public service broadcasters are able to thrive. The Government should focus on sector-wide structural changes which drive innovation while maintaining media independence. Any interventions must also work with market trends, not create artificial demand.

Tax reliefs are one way to reduce the costs of producing quality journalism.

The Government should review the impacts of business rates relief on local newspaper offices. If found to be helpful, this scheme should be extended until 2029. The Government should also issue a consultation before the 2025 summer recess on tax breaks for hiring local journalists.

Local authority public notice advertising is a substantial source of income for local print news providers (many of which are owned by large conglomerates). The rules generally exclude digital titles and smaller outlets that publish print editions less frequently. Questions remain about using local government advertising to support local media, as this risks becoming a market distortion. However, if this spending is happening anyway, modest changes would help to make the situation more equitable.

The Government should consult on changing the definition of a “newspaper” to allow local authorities greater flexibility in determining the most effective use of public notice advertising spend. We suggest local authorities should be permitted to use both online providers and a wider variety of print outlets.

Local authorities should ensure public notice adverts remain accessible to digitally excluded groups. In line with the findings from our 2023 report on digital exclusion, we recommend local and central government advertising teams explore creative ways to engage digitally excluded groups (for example using community centres and local hubs ) .

Media organisations will need to innovate and take more risks to transition to long-term sustainable business models. The UK already has good innovation initiatives for other industries which help catalyse, scale and monetise new ideas. The news sector needs one too.

The Government should establish a new Future News innovation catalyst scheme. The objective should be to facilitate technology-driven business transformation to help participants improve their long-term financial sustainability. While the Government should provide the funding, the scheme should be delivered independently. It should learn from the successes and shortcomings of the previous pilot. The number of recipients should be small to ensure the available funding can make a meaningful difference. Some grants should be match funded by recipients to ensure value for money and participant buy-in.

The financial precarity of many jobs in journalism is not conducive to attracting a diverse workforce representative of the UK’s population. We welcome schemes from industry and the National Council for the Training of Journalists to attract and train under-represented groups, particularly outside London. As part of its local media strategy the Government should seek partnership funding to support attraction and training schemes for local news, including apprenticeships.

As part of its local media strategy the Government should seek partnership funding to support attraction and training schemes for local news, including apprenticeships .

The upcoming Charter Review is a key opportunity to refresh the BBC’s relationship with local news.

The Government should give the BBC an objective to engage with local news providers as strategic partners. This should involve expanding the Local Democracy Reporting Service and increasing the proportion of journalists allocated to small (including online-only) outlets. The BBC should also explore expanding its apprenticeship scheme in ways that support local news.

The BBC must pursue transformational innovation as new technologies fundamentally reshape the news environment. In doing so, it should benefit the wider health of the UK media sector.

Developing a public interest news generative AI tool is one option the BBC could explore as it seeks to keep pace with new technologies and changing consumer habits. This might involve a service that is designed to improve public access to authoritative information—perhaps with a particular focus on partnering with local news organisations. Any major projects of this nature would need to be subject to industry consultation and relevant public value and market impact assessments.

We encourage tech platforms to give more prominence to recognised news publishers (as defined in the Online Safety Act 2023 ), for example through better visual cues or adjusting prominence on user feeds. This should be an industry-led initiative: we do not support a mandatory Government-led kitemark scheme.

We are concerned that tech platforms have been imposing age restrictions on news that is Ofcom-compliant. We are also concerned at reports of ‘shadow bans’ and the blocking of other legitimate content.

Ofcom should engage with tech platforms at pace to align content moderation policies with Ofcom’s broadcasting codes and the duties contained in the Online Safety Act 2023. When implementing the Act’s protections for news publishers, Ofcom should pay particular attention to grey areas where content is not blocked but subtly downranked to minimise user engagement.

More transparency over tech platforms’ algorithms is needed (even if transparency on its own will not be enough). Empowering the regulators quickly is necessary and achievable.

The Government should give Ofcom the necessary powers to investigate tech firm recommender algorithms and the operations of large language models (LLMs). This will become increasingly important amid concerns about the potential for political influence and bias in LLMs.

Advances in generative AI are enabling tech firms to provide engaging and high quality news summaries. This suggests they are increasingly acting as publishers and may need to be regulated as such. Ofcom’s media plurality framework is rapidly becoming outdated, and the previous Government’s years-long timeline for implementing vital changes has been inadequate.

The Government should commit to a 12 month deadline for responding to future Ofcom priority recommendations on media plurality.

The Government’s proposed amendments to the media mergers regime are a good start. But we are disappointed it has not sought a wider update to the media plurality regime. The decision to exclude online intermediaries looks oddly short sighted given the rapid advances in tech firms’ ability to produce news summaries. We appreciate that tech firms are not newspapers but this does not mean their evolving role in the news landscape should be overlooked.

We recommend the Government works with Ofcom to set out plans and timelines for capturing online news intermediaries within the scope of the media ownership rules .

The Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum should establish a dedicated workstream examining areas of regulatory crossover , conflict and collaboration that will affect the news sector—focusing in particular on privacy, advertising and competition.

The use of news content to train generative AI has the potential to reshape the economics of the media industry. The UK needs a better framework for governing how this works. There are arguments for and against tougher rules. On the one hand, the UK must remain competitive in AI development, or else lose any claim to international leadership. Economic prosperity, public sector efficiencies and national security all provide good arguments for establishing an AI-friendly training regime.

But that does not mean the Government should pursue rules that primarily benefit foreign tech firms (who seem prepared to pay vast sums on energy, computing facilities and staff—but not on data). Previous efforts to find a solution have been weak and ineffectual. The Government must aim for a robust framework that helps the creative industries strike mutually beneficial deals with tech firms, aligns incentives, respects intellectual property and champions responsible AI development in the UK. Media organisations, for their part, will need to continue to demonstrate their value—and be clear that their position is not about special pleading or propping up outlets for which there is limited demand.

While we welcome the new Government’s desire to make progress on this issue, we caution strongly against adopting a flawed opt-out regime comparable to the version operating in the EU. Much better means for ensuring technical viability, transparency, consent and enforcement are needed for a new text and data mining regime to work to UK advantage. If the Government gets this right, it can provide speedy regulatory certainty and encourage a new AI-licensing startup scene to flourish too.

Any proposal for a new text and data mining regime must include transparency mechanisms that enable rightsholders to check whether their data has been used. It must offer technical enforceability that goes beyond the likes of robots.txt indicators, which remain inadequate. Meaningful sanctions for non-compliance are essential and the Government’s anticipated IP consultation should explore the options for independent regulatory enforcement. Requirements for web crawlers to identify their purpose are needed too. The Government should encourage good practice by championing an emerging market for licensed AI data training providers. We urge the Government to dedicate significant technical, policy and political resource to address these challenges at pace. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology should outline its plans in response to this report.

The Competition and Markets Authority should investigate and address tech firms leveraging dominance in one domain, notably internet search, to secure anti -competitive advantages in obtaining data for generative AI training. We suggest this should be an immediate priority given the pace of market developments and impacts on news media business models .

The UK’s broadcasting market will only thrive if there is healthy competition, a focus on serving all audiences and respect for the rules. New entrants like GB News provide an alternative to the public service broadcasters. Their offering needs to comply with the spirit of the rules, not stretch them to breaking point. Public service broadcasters, for their part, should reflect on why alternative providers are finding a following and how this relates to the way underserved communities are represented in their own news coverage.

Ofcom’s senior leadership argued that its approach to impartiality had been very clear. We struggled to reconcile this with the evidence. Ofcom’s approach has sparked accusations of a two-tier system on the one hand, and of overreaction on the other. This risks dissatisfaction on all sides. We were reassured that Ofcom is aware of the challenges and the need to avoid the impression that political sensitivities have influenced regulatory enforcement. But more transparency in future would help, particularly around the thresholds at which alternative interpretations of the rules might apply. Ofcom must also remain alive to the risk that underserved audiences may migrate online or switch off altogether: healthy plurality in broadcasting therefore remains key to the sector’s long-term viability.

Better information is also needed about the drivers of audience trust in broadcast news. This is notoriously difficult and not helped by the inconsistency in methods.

Ofcom should conduct more thorough longitudinal audience research with consistent metrics and more granular audience profiles, focusing both on the drivers of trust and confidence in due impartiality being upheld. This could include more detailed assessments of audience views about using politicians as presenters.

The rise of brand safety organisations has raised complex questions about the extent and implications of their work.

The Government’s online advertising taskforce should review the work and impact of brand safety organisations on news publisher revenue.

We welcome efforts to improve trust in the information environment, but we caution against a counter-mis/disinformation strategy that relies too heavily on measures in the Online Safety Act, or technical fixes like watermarks, labelling and algorithmic tweaking. Some of these are doubtless welcome, but such solutions are unlikely to tackle the root causes of supply and demand. They raise questions about potential overreach and free speech sensitivities. And they risk creating strategic dependencies on overseas tech firms to address highly sensitive societal challenges.

The Government should focus more on strengthening long- term resilience. We suggest four priorities. (1) First is recognising more explicitly the value of a financially sustainable news sector: this is the best way to maintain a shared understanding of facts. (2) Second, the Government could engage further with media organisations about protocols for responding to major foreign interference efforts, particularly around elections. (3) Third, the Government should adopt a more muscular deterrence posture to impose greater costs on adversaries , for example using responsible cyber power to degrade adversary infrastructure . This could feature in the Strategic Defence Review currently underway . (4) Fourth is media literacy. We are not yet convinced that the Government has a good plan. More resources and effort are needed to scale ‘what works’ in media literacy, and avoid a tangle of short-term fragmented projects. Ofcom is already taking on major burdens: we hope it is not left to be the main lead for such a complex policy issue. The Government needs its own strategy. DSIT should set out its future plans for media literacy and timeline for evaluating its current activities in response to this report. The Department for Education should use the opportunity of the Curriculum and Assessment Review to ensure that media literacy is given more time and prominence in schools.

The new Government is failing to prioritise anti-SLAPP legislation. This is troubling and has serious potential consequences for press freedom and the future of the news industry. There has already been a public consultation. Viable legislative options and precedents exist. What is missing now is political will. Its absence reflects poorly on the new Government’s values and commitment to justice. We are not persuaded that the complexity of the issue, or the need for cross-government engagement, are a valid excuse for lengthy delays.

The Government should publish draft legislative proposals before the 2025 summer recess and allow time for proper scrutiny. If necessary it should explore using the Victims, Courts and Public Protection Bill, announced in the recent King’s Speech, as a vehicle.

Anti-SLAPP legislation is unlikely to be supported by everyone in the legal profession. Some concerns are valid, others less so. The Ministry of Justice must learn lessons from the experience of developing the Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation Bill introduced in the previous session of Parliament. We heard that it was initially drafted in ways that would make the situation worse. We would like to understand the process by which this came about.

In response to this report the Ministry of Justice should publish an exhaustive list of stakeholders it engaged with in relation to the development of the Private Member’s Bill between May 2023 and May 2024. This should include the names of organisations, meeting dates and topics, and substantive written correspondence.

We applaud the progress made by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) in recent years. However, we do not agree that it should conduct thematic evaluations of SLAPPs that deliberately exclude the law firms accused of malpractice. Predictably and implausibly, these evaluations have found limited evidence of wrongdoing. This risks creating a flawed evidence base to inform public debate. With transparent governance structures and information firewalls between teams, it should be possible to conduct multiple separate engagements with the same firm without prejudicing the outcome of investigations.

The SRA’s future reviews of SLAPP activity should not exclude law firms subject to ongoing investigations. The Government should also review whether the SRA has the necessary inspection powers to enable more targeted assessments.

The £25,000 fining limit for the Solicitors Regulation Authority is too low. The changes in the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency (ECCT) Act 2023 are a welcome start but appear too tightly circumscribed to have the desired effect.

The Legal Services Board should work with the Ministry of Justice to raise the fining limit to £250 million for SLAPPs. We would be grateful for a progress update before the 2025 summer recess.

The Government should extend the SRA’s remit to ensure that activities commissioned directly by solicitors can be subject to regulatory oversight. This would prevent lawyers from outsourcing harassment to third parties without scrutiny.

We commend the Government’s progress in establishing the SLAPPs Taskforce. We urge participants to maintain momentum. Particular attention should be paid to engaging the police to establish a standard way of reporting intimidation of journalists, and tackling transnational repression from foreign states.

The Government should amend section 327 of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 to clarify that subsection (1) applies to the acceptance of proceeds of crime as payment for legal services. If necessary this could specify the application to services provided in relation to litigation which has the intention or effect of supressing reporting on matters of public interest.

The Government should also update Anti-Money Laundering legislation to ensure solicitors have to conduct more comprehensive due diligence, including source of wealth and customer background checks, for cases that concern matters of public interest. The SRA should be given powers to conduct spot checks to provide an effective deterrent.