Written by In February, the IRG team took up the invitation from the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) to tackle one of the most thrilling – and challenging – tasks in news media research: World Press Trends.
Published by WAN-IFRA since 1989, WPT is the leading source of newspaper data and trends globally. The data are drawn from WAN-IFRA’s member associations in 66 countries and from industry data partners, Chartbeat, PwC, Ipsos and Zenith. To that, IRG will be adding data from the World Bank, the International Telecommunications Union and more.
“Of course, we’re thrilled by the challenge,” says Dr François Nel, who will be editing the WPT and working alongside his IRG research partner Dr Coral Milburn-Curtis. “With the analytical expertise of Coral, we are able to do some advanced statistically analysis to drawing insights from this huge data, which has traditionally only been presented as in descriptive charts. This will allow us to better understand the relationship between various key indicators, such as press freedom and internet penetration on news consumption.
This is just one of the changes the team intend to make to WPT. “We need to take a loot not just at what the data says, but what data we need to get to help up not only observe but also understand the huge changes in the world news media industry. Of course, all the changes we envision will take time to implement. But, for now, we’re excited to present our first report at 9:30am on Friday, June 8th at 70th World News Media Congress in Portugal. ”
Full details can be found at http://www.wan-ifra.org/wpt.
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