Why mainstream news media still matter

It is frequently claimed that mainstream news organisations are in crisis and becoming ever more marginalised in the contemporary high-choice media environment. Such claims frequently conflate different challenges facing the industry, resulting in over-generalised claims about the prospects for established news brands. In this article, we identify four related crises: reach, resource, reputation and relevance. Through the analysis of each, we show that many claims about the displacement of mainstream news are overstated, but that the interactive aspects of these crises are presenting particularly significant challenges for local news production and news organisations orientated towards impartiality norms.