This morning, we made our way to Regents University. A beautiful campus in London, that you wouldn’t even guess was there. To start off this trip, we met with Jason Makenzie, who gave us an overview of the media landscape in the UK. Jason was a very interesting man and allowed us to have a great discussion about media, and how it differentiated from the US.
During this time we spoke about the many different publishing outlets, and how the media is viewed. With 66 million people living in the UK, it is much smaller than the US. He spoke about how it is common for platforms to become publishers, and how it will affect not only journalists but readers. The moral grounds a platform will hold when it comes to what they publish, and the morals of the journalist. This interested me in the age of online publications, and how platforms cant produce stories, they must produce content. He also spoke about content and how a piece of content is valued compared to hard-hitting stories. An interesting fact Jason said was that in the UK, similar to the US, there are 6 PR professionals for every journalist. I did not know this and was a bit shocked to find this out.
From there Jason spoke about the future of media. From AI to VR. Communication in the UK is in between print and digital now and will see more and more digital coming at the same rates of the US.