Just read a brilliant book called The Invention of News by the historian Andrew Pettegree. Heartened to see another book saying that quality news can survive – a point we made in our own book The Future of Quality News Journalism, published by Routledge last autumn. Here’s an extract from my chapter about the press in Britain, both print and online:
THE MOMENT the British quality press entered the modern age can be timed precisely to January 26, 1986 – but that date also heralded a crisis soon to unfold in the print press that many commentators believe may ultimately be terminal. It was then that Rupert Murdoch, already the biggest media owner in the UK, secretly moved the printing of his four national newspapers, The Times, The Sunday Times, the Sun and News of the World to a new editorial headquarters at Wapping. Hot metal printing that dated back to the era of Britain’s first real newspaper, the Daily Courant of 1702, was abandoned and traditional printers lost their jobs. The copy for the newspapers was input by journalists, thus removing an expensive and labour-intensive production process that dated back to Caxton. A bitter battle was fought with the print unions, who picketed the new offices for more than a year before finally being forced to accept that their era was over.
Although it was described as the “Wapping revolution”, it wasn’t much of a revolution at all, since printing staff were still needed – albeit unskilled and on lower wages – physically to paste the text produced by the editorial staff into the pages. Lowering costs and removing restrictive practices did however lead to a temporary flowering of quality journalism. Pagination of papers such as The Sunday Times went up to the point where a single edition would contain more words than a fairly weighty novel and a number of new newspapers were born, freed from the traditional overheads that had beset Fleet Street for decades. The Times and the Guardian were able to produce additional supplements supported by columns of classified advertising, folded inside the main edition, unhindered by industrial disputes that often accompanied increases in pagination. They were helped by another new technology that allowed for the transmission of pages over ISDN lines to regional printing sites, thus reducing the need for expensive capital equipment in central London. This in turn permitted newspapers to move away from the urban centre to the periphery. Now, bar the London office of one regional group, no newspaper has offices in Fleet Street.
At the same time the arrival of a bonanza of new titles was predicted since start-up costs were instantly lowered. One that made its way into print, was Today, a tabloid newspaper modelled on USA Today, America’s only national newspaper, which took advantage of the new technology to print in colour and present information in new ways such as the use of information graphics. Launched on March 4, 1986, Today was the brainchild of Eddy Shah, a Lancashire printworks owner, who ran a chain of free newspapers out of Warrington. Shah had already fought and won his own sometimes violent battle with the typesetters union, the National Graphical Association. Presciently, Today was produced on a network of Apple Macintosh personal computers, long before the California company became one of the dominant forces in world media. Michael Williams, who was the paper’s graphics editor and features editor on launch, says: ” Shah foresaw the potential of the computer revolution and its ability to lower costs, although he could not have envisaged the power of companies like Apple to eventually develop a platform such as the iPad that would not only enhance the possibilities of print but simultaneously to help hasten its demise.” But Shah’s weakness was that he saw himself in an old tradition of interfering proprietors. He employed many serious journalists, such as the editor Brian MacArthur, a former Sunday Times deputy editor, who told the story in his book Eddy Shah and the Newspaper Revolution (1). But Shah failed to sustain the vision of quality journalism that he proclaimed at the outset, and his paper ended up as indistinguishable from others in the middle market.” The first high-tech, non-union paper was destined to fail, finally closing in November 1995 after Rupert Murdoch had acquired it. Even the alchemy of the greatest media mogul of the age had failed to save it. Other new enterprises of the period flopped, too. The Sunday Correspondent, a new Sunday newspaper pitched at the quality market, folded a little over a year after its launch on September 17, 1989, and the News on Sunday, committed to presenting news from a left-of-centre viewpoint, also succumbed surviving only seven months after launching in April 1987.
The single start-up survivor has been The Independent (along with its sister paper the Independent on Sunday). The daily title was launched on October 7, 1986, and the Independent on Sunday in 1990. Since then both papers have established themselves as a world brand signifying high-quality journalism, although their commercial existence continues to be precarious. So, far from being groundbreaking, history now shows that Wapping was more a last gasp than a revolution. All the while there had been another infinitely more potent development incubating in the background, as nascent broadband networks started to improve and become more widely available in the mid-1990s. At the same time, newspaper buying habits were fast transmogrifying – victim of increasingly busy lives, more mobile work patterns and greater choice of media outlets. Rupert Murdoch brought US cable-style rolling news to Britain on February 5, 1989, under his Sky News banner, offering headlines in quick bites round the clock. Sunday newspapers were particularly affected by changed social trends as they had to compete no longer just with church attendance, but with the weekly supermarket shop now available for longer, the gym, Premier League football, longer licensing hours and a host of other diversions as Britain headed into the 24-hour society.
Battle of the formats
Desperate to innovate in a declining market, the managements of three of the quality titles experimented with new formats in a bid to uphold flagging circulations. The Independent determined that the larger format of broadsheet newspapers might be a deterrent to young readers, many of whom consumed their papers on public transport on the way to the office, and launched a smaller format paper. It christened the new product a “compact” to signal that it was different from the more downmarket “tabloid” papers although, in fact it was technically a tabloid, too, since it was printed at precisely half the size of a broadsheet. The initial success of the paper when it was launched in September 2003 forced Rupert Murdoch’s Times to follow suit just two months later. These papers were no more expensive to produce than their broadsheet counterparts, since they could be printed on existing presses, and had the cost-saving advantage of fewer editorial columns. Nevertheless, the new style was deemed to have had an impact on the perception of quality. Alan Rusbridger, editor of the rival Guardian, said in 2005: “All I can say is that two of our most important newspapers have changed, quite strikingly, in ways beyond mere shape. And that is not without significance. How journalists tell stories has an effect on the civic process. Ask anyone in public life.” The Guardian’s attempt to be different took it along a more costly route, with a format size midway between the traditional British broadsheet and tabloid formats. It was known as the “Berliner” since it was based around a format favoured by European papers, notably the German quality newspaper Berliner Zeitung. However, no presses were available in Britain to print at that size, so the Guardian opted to invest £50m in new machinery – which turned out to be of questionable value, since within three years the circulation had dropped back to the level it was at when the broadsheet was abandoned. Today, the circulations of the Guardian, The Independent and The Times are all lower than the final editions of their broadsheet counterparts. In defence of the changes, it was argued that circulations would have fallen even further if they had the changes in format not been made. However, the Daily Telegraph, which retained its broadsheet format did not turn out lose proportionately more readers by staying the same.
Today the quality daily national newspaper press in Britain can be reckoned to comprise the following:
i The Daily Telegraph, with a circulation of 587,040 copies a day in January 2012, compared with more than a million in the late 1940s, is the only remaining broadsheet quality paper (excluding the specialist Financial Times). Privately owned by the property developer Barclay twins, it is both the largest selling and the only quality paper to make money. Regarded as the Conservative Party House journal, its readers are the traditional middle classes of Britain – in some ways similar to the mid-market Daily Mail, leading to the nickname the “Daily Mailygraph”. However, its readers see themselves as socially above the Mail’s, and the paper reflects this with its emphasis on a Country Life and “Urban Sloane” agenda. Paradoxically, given its traditional social outlook, the paper was a pioneer in moving into multi-platform journalism and was the first of the nationals to reinvent its newsroom to meet the demands of the new convergent digital world. Its website, which is one of the world’s most successful, with 2,353,047 unique daily users in June 2012 took a first step towards a paywall in November that year.
ii The Guardian The leading quality newspaper of liberal Britain, it has a unique commercial structure with no proprietor, shareholders or distribution of profits, instead answering to the Scott Trust, which defines its role as “to secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity as a quality national newspaper without party affiliation; remaining faithful to its liberal tradition; as a profit-seeking enterprise managed in an efficient and cost-effective manner.” In this it is supported by a number of outside investments, which provide a cross-subsidy. The absence of the need to distribute profits has allowed it to invest heavily in its website which is one of the most viewed in the world with 3,374,984 unique daily users in June 2012. However, print sales have continued to decline heavily – the circulation in January 2012 was 215,988 compared with 494,000 in January 1987. There have been substantial redundancies among both editorial and commercial staff, and in February 2010 the Guardian Media Group was forced to sell its sister paper the Manchester Evening News (itself a standard-bearer for quality in the regional press), cutting umbilical ties with the city where it was founded. The editor Alan Rusbridger has hinted the future of the print edition may be finite. The strategy now is to extend the “brand” (see section on business models below) and the newspaper’s influence worldwide, notably in the United States. That influence is described by a former deputy editor Peter Cole (2): “It is scorned by its opponents, loved by its supporters. Millions who have never read it believe they know what it represents – and they are often wrong. It hangs its conscience on its sleeve. Its critics accuse it of an unworldly disconnection with the concerns of ‘ordinary people’, but then Guardian readers do not see themselves as ordinary people.”
iii The Times Once known as “The Thunderer” it is Britain’s most famous newspaper. Historically it has been a paper of record, gazetting matters of importance to the establishment – law reports, church appointments, the affairs of court and so on. It was famous for its letters page, known as the top people’s “tribal noticeboard”. Since it was bought by Rupert Murdoch in 1981, it has developed a more popular outlook, although still retaining some of its original features such as the “Court Circular” and law reports. The circulation in January 2012 was 397,549, down from 821,000 in 1997.
iv The Independent is the smallest of the quality newspapers (with a circulation of just 105,160 in January 2012 roughly a quarter of its peak of around 400,000 after its launch in 1986). But the newspaper still has an influence vastly out of proportion to its size. Founded in 1986 by three journalists from the Daily Telegraph who sought to change the model of traditional proprietorship after Wapping, it has moved far from its original pitch both commercially and editorially. Although its initial success derived from an appeal to the “yuppies” of the Thatcher era (with the famous slogan “It is, Are You”) it has moved leftwards and through many metaphorphoses of ownership, including a long period owned by the Irish entrepreneur Tony O’ Reilly’s Independent Newspapers. Unable to sustain heavy losses, O’Reilly sold it to a former Russian spy Alexander Lebedev in March 2010 for £1. The new owners cut costs still further by renting space in the offices of the Daily Mail and sharing back office services. Recently further economies required some staff to work from home to save costs. The paper was late into seeing the potential of the internet and has the least-developed website, with 12,793,451 unique users in June 2011.
The Financial Times, known as the “Pink ‘Un”, is a different product altogether – less newspaper than the brand behind one of the world’s leading news and business organisations. It is unique among British quality newspapers in that is owned by a public company, Pearson PLC Although its circulation in January 2012 was 316,493, some two thirds overseas. The FT is unusual in having a thriving website with 4.5 million registered users and over 285,000 digital subscribers.
Circulation and revenues face irreversible decline
Although all the UK quality titles are intrinsically different in ownership, readership and business models, there are two factors common to all: they are all experiencing irreversible decline in circulations and print revenue, forcing them to cut costs. At the same time, digital revenue growth has failed to offset print decline. By the second decade of the 21st century a new generation of sophisticated portable devices such as tablet computers and phones connected to 3G and 4G networks had accelerated the decline still further, underlining the weakness of newsprint as a delivery platform for news – which can now be obtained instantly almost anywhere in the world across a variety of platforms. There was no better example of the redundancy of Britain’s printed newspapers in their traditional job of disseminating news than the morning of November 6, 2012, when the results of the American presidential election were declared. The UK’s national quality newspapers went on sale without the results of the election (which had been confirmed at 6.30am UK time) and with a series of bland headlines written the night before, such as “The Decision” (The Times) and “America’s verdict on Obama”(3). Meanwhile, there could scarcely be an interested citizen of any western democracy who didn’t already know the result by breakfast-time that day and seen it dissected and analysed on a multiplicity of digital media.
In the new multi-platform world, two key sources of revenue for quality newspapers – copy sales revenue (retail sales and subscriptions) and display and classified advertising – are both exposed to ever greater pressures. Circulation, as we have seen above, is in long-term decline and has accelerated since 2005 and cover price rises have been held back for fear of further circulation losses. Display advertising has been hit by economic recession and by new sophistication in advertising on the internet using new search and targeting techniques. Classified advertising has plummeted as it has moved to dedicated and more searchable websites. The media consultancy Enders Analysis identifies a number of salient factors (4) affecting press copy volume sales between 2005 and 2010, which include the fact that PC-based internet-broadband adoption leapt from 34% to 68% of UK households; a deep recession in 2009 from which the consumer has yet to recover, and a lack of engagement with print news media by young adults (of which more later). The circulation decline between 2005 and 2010 has been a consistent feature of all press categories, but larger at the quality nationals. Quality circulations are down by 24% compared with 17% for popular papers, which means that the qualities have lost national market share. By 2015 75% of all adults are expected to have purchased a smartphone (iPhone or Android) and tablets will continue to enable mobile news activities on the internet. At the same time, it is reckoned that competition between newspaper titles will become more aggressive.
By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the quality press was losing money in large quantities, too. The Times and Sunday Times lost £45.1m pre-tax in 2010, before apparently improving to an 11.6m deficit in the year to June 30 2011 – although the true trading performance is more likely worse. Some industry estimates suggest it is possible that 2011 pre-tax losses were around £60m. For a rough comparison, the Guardian and Observer lost £43.8m in the year to March 30 2011. The Independent titles also lose money, reckoned to be at least £10m a year. Of the general broadsheets in Britain, it is only the market-leading Daily Telegraph and its smaller Sunday sister that make a significant profit: £47.9m in 2011 (5) The Financial Times, as a specialist publication, is not directly comparable. For the year 2011, profits at the newspaper were £76m, helped by digital subscriptions, which were more than half the total paid circulation.
Online publishing imposes new demands
The demands of online publishing have forced an entire re-evaluation of the conventional news cycle, in which all activity was geared towards having a newspaper on sale at breakfast time each morning. In the new web world, deadlines have become redundant as news content is poured into the various platforms as soon as it arrives. As Jim Hall puts it: “web publication is changing the basic forms of news writing in terms of how it is read, how it looks and how it works.” Stories have become shorter, requiring a different style of writing to accommodate the need for adding further content as a story develops. Even headlines have had to change to fit in with the requirements of “word search” rendering them more prosaic in many instances. Some have argued that this has not necessarily led to a reduction in quality, since stories of almost infinite length can be accommodated, as the physical constraints of newsprint have disappeared, and the web permits not only a fuller version of a story to be published but also accompanied by context and links to other related material – the so-called “long tail” identified by the web evangelist Chris Anderson (8).
One of the biggest impacts of all these changes has been in the area of staffing, with hundreds of journalists losing their jobs over the past three decades. In his book Flat Earth News, Nick Davies found that that 20 years after Wapping staff levels of national newspapers were slightly lower, but the amount of space journalists were filling in their papers had trebled. “To put it another way, during those 20 years, the average time allowed for national newspaper journalists to find and check their stories had been cut to a third of its former level…That is a disaster. It shoves a blade right into the heart of the practice of journalism. If truth is the object and checking is the function then the primary working asset of all journalists, always and everywhere, is time. Take away time and you take away truth”. The impact of job losses on specialisms has been particularly hard. No UK popular newspaper now has a staffed foreign bureau (in contrast to, say, the Daily Express of the 1950s – famous for its foreign bureau in every continent of the world). Staff photographers are an almost extinct breed. The Independent, once world famous for the quality of its photography, no longer employs a single photographer.
The dumbing down debate
The combined pressure of reduced staffing, increased workloads and the commercial pressures of a more competitive market have led to what many commentators have labelled “dumbing down” – a general driving down of standards across the board. In a paper in the British Journalism Review in 2011 , Michael Williams, a long-standing national newspaper executive, who had served on the home news staff of The Times, the head of news and features at The Sunday Times and as deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday and was now teaching in a university journalism school, wrote about what he saw as an “altered journalistic landscape, less principled than the one I encountered when I began my own career on the Thomson-owned Times in the 1970s. From the regional papers, those once-great powerhouses of civic discourse, through TV and radio which once believed in community as much as celebrity, the story is the same. The pressure to produce cheap uncontroversial stories, full of material that commercial managers think readers want to hear, often divorced from local context as regional newspapers move to centralised production at print centres, and the nationals fire their regional reporters and seasoned foreign correspondents. The common denominator is a low-grade package of TV, ‘lifestyle’ and celebrity coverage and heavy reliance on press releases which are frequently published verbatim and unchecked. (I know this first hand because I have read my own words, unaltered from those written in my book publisher’s press releases, in newspapers where no reporter has lifted the telephone to talk to me).”
The former Times editor Harold Evans told the Leveson inquiry in 2012 (see section below) that he did not agree with an assertion made by the Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre to the same inquiry that the standards of the British press had improved over the past 20 years: “We’ve got a situation in which newspapers are employing private detectives! We used to employ reporters, trained reporters whose job it was to find the facts. and the idea that the press has now come to the fringes of the criminal underworld, I’m totally appalled by what I see. So I have to part company from Mr Dacre in that regard, while paying tribute to the general standards, the quality of papers in Britain, the Guardian, the Telegraph and The Times remain pretty good…”
However, not all support the dumbing down thesis. One analyst, Mick Temple, writes: “Concerns that dumbing down is responsible for the rise in public apathy about politics ignore the need for public spheres that will engage the politically illiterate or disenchanted in a way that will encourage them to participate in public debate…A less elite-driven news agenda – one driven by the interests of the audience rather than by a small core of political journalists – offers the opportunity for engagement with political issues by those (the vast majority) uninterested in the minutiae of policy or the internal differences of the Conservative Party…The task of providing accessible, entertaining yet authoritative ‘ground-level’ introduction to political and social issues is essential if the mass of citizens are to remain connected in any meaningful way to the public sphere”. Others have argued that while there is clearly a change of tone in the contents of our so-called quality newspaper, it does not reflect a fall in quality, just that there is something different going on. As the Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger puts it: [dumbing down] “is a plausible way of describing the disenchantment of the people who either were, or missed out on being the ‘old elite’, with this new difficult world in which high culture and so-called low culture meet, in which classes blur and different voices are heard. Dumbing down is a dumb word to describe something far more complex at work in society today and every alarm bell ought to ring every time you hear it”.
Nevertheless commercial pressures have been brought to bear on the editorial process of quality newspapers in ways that would have been unthinkable 50 years ago. On one morning in November 2011, the mobile phone company Vodafone paid for every national newspaper to have an advertising “wraparound” masquerading as the front page. Display advertising is allowed to protrude into editorial columns in shapes that are often to the detriment of the display of news. All quality newspapers carry supplements sponsored by sometimes eccentric organisations and dubious overseas regimes that might have been shunned in more prosperous times. Traditional “chinese walls” between editorial and advertising departments have been eroded by advertising managers desperate to retain clients and sell “advertorial”. Concerns were raised even a decade ago by Brian McNair “Further commercial pressure is exerted, according to some variants of the economic approach, by the constraints raised placed on journalistic content because of the need to attract and retain advertising revenue”.
Aligned to this is what has been labelled “churnalism” by the Guardian investigative reporter Nick Davies in his book Flat Earth News. Davies identifies churnalism as a type of journalism in which reporters rewrite press releases and agency copy without checking or follow-up in order to meet pressures of time and cost imposed by managements. He reported on a study by Professor Justin Lewis and a team of researchers at Cardiff University which revealed that 80 per cent of stories in the quality press in Britain were not original and that only 12 per cent were based on original material generated by journalists, with obvious implications for quality and accuracy. The point was emphasised by a documentary, Starsuckers, directed by Paul Atkins, in which fake stories were generated, including one in which the hair of the singer Amy Winehouse was said to have caught fire. Several British newspapers published the fake stories without checking and they went on to be reported as fact by numerous publications around the world.
Rise of the celebrity culture
A by-product of the “churnalism” industry has been a growing infatuation with celebrity, often feeding off television soap operas and reality shows. Celebrity journalism, with its reliance on the PR industry, is cheaper to produce and sometimes benefits other shared business interests. For example, Richard Desmond’s Daily Star, was filled with the activities of the cast of Celebrity Big Brother while it was showing on Channel 5, also owned by Desmond. Such is the draw of celebrity journalism that the travel sections of some papers, such as the Mail on Sunday insist that the lead travel article should be written by an recognisable celebrity, no matter the quality of their copy or whether they have anything interesting to say. While celebrity culture is a reflection of the wider obsession of society as a whole, it has been absorbed on an industrial scale by the “red-top” press, with columns such as the Sun‘s Bizarre and the Mirror‘s 3am Girls, with their ancillary industries of intrusive paparazzi and lucrative tip-offs. It was the pressures of this culture that led to the misdeeds revealed by the Leveson inquiry as journalists competed, not only among themselves but with celebrity websites to uncover the latest gossip scandal.
The celebrity obsession extends wider than the tabloids or the middle-market papers. According to a survey by the group Women in Journalism in October 2012, the Duchess of Cambridge, along with the abduction victim Madeleine McCann was the most frequently depicted woman on a British newspaper front page over a period of four weeks, including qualities. One of the front pages on which the duchess most regularly appears (as well as her sister Pippa) is that of the “quality” Daily Telegraph. The Independent has not been slow the embrace the cult of celebrity, inviting such diverse figures as the rock star Bono and the comedian David Walliams to guest-edit editions of the paper. However the celebrity obsession has not been mostly harmless, as some have claimed. In 2012, it emerged that the disc-jockey Jimmy Savile had been an abusive paedophile for most of his career at the BBC, and that the Corporation’s flagship serial news programme, Newsnight, had scrapped an investigation into his behaviour, while a tribute went ahead on another BBC channel. As the columnist Deborah Orr wrote in the Guardian: “The cult of celebrity abetted Savile in both his exploitation and his ability to get away with it.”
Leveson and the crisis in ethics
Although the Leveson Inquiry into the ethics of the British press did not come about because of a failure of quality journalism in the sense that it is defined in this chapter, the inquiry was set up, in essence, to address a failure of the quality in the way ethics are applied to newsgathering. Lord Justice Leveson, a senior High Court judge, was appointed by the Prime Minister David Cameron in July 2011 after it had been revealed that journalists from Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday newspaper, the News of the World, had hacked into the mobile phone of a murdered teenager, Milly Dowler. It was the biggest examination of the operations of the British press since the Calcutt inquiry of June 1990, when journalists were told by the then culture secretary David Mellor, that “they were drinking in the last chance saloon”. A parade of witnesses revealed that abuse by journalists was widespread – not just phone-hacking , but intrusion, doorstepping, “blagging”, distortion of fact and other nefarious practices. Most of it involved the red-top and middle market press, but the traditional quality titles did not escape unscathed. Sir Harold Evans, the distinguished former editor of The Times and the Sunday Times, told Lord Leveson of protracted interference by his proprietor Rupert Murdoch during his editorship of the paper in 1981. Later, in the context of Leveson, he wrote of how that interference operated at a subtle level: “In all Murdoch’s far-flung enterprises, the question is not whether this or that is a good idea but ‘What will Rupert think?’ He doesn’t have to give direct orders. His executives act like courtiers, working towards what they perceive to be his wishes or what might be construed as his wishes”.
In another piece of evidence submitted to Leveson, a former Sunday Times executive, Michael Williams, told of meetings with the mogul: “He would have his staff delivered by chauffeur to his London home or that of his chief executive, where he would declaim his prejudices about the politicians or businessmen who seemed not to fit in with the aspirations of the company. No one dared dissent in case they fell out of favour”. Other transgressions on the part of some areas of the quality press were exposed at Leveson, including the smearing of a teacher who had been a suspect in a Bristol murder case but was entirely innocent. James Harding, the editor of The Times, was forced to apologise to the inquiry after it was revealed that a Times reporter had hacked into a police blog, “Nightjack”. Later the newspaper paid the author £42,000 damages in a High Court settlement.
Internet advertising diverts the “river of gold”
By the end of the 1990s, as newspapers struggled against the migration to the web of what was once known as the “river of gold” of traditional classified advertising, it was clear that they were never going to recover their supremacy in the medium. No longer would advertising and news, like the proverbial horse and carriage, be inseparable as they had been in the days when The Times thought advertising so important that it covered its front page with classifieds, which it deemed more important than news, a practice that came to an end only as recently as 1966. Now most classified ads in the main newspaper are restricted to the Court page or dating section. As the owner of the paper, Rupert Murdoch stated: “This is a generational thing; we’ve been taking a 15- or 20-year-old slide on this. Certainly I don’t know anyone under 30 who has ever looked at a classified advertisement in a newspaper”. As the Economist once pointed out, “A newspaper is a package of content – politics, sport, share prices, weather and so forth – which exists to attract eyeballs to advertisements Unfortunately for newspapers, the internet is better at delivering some of that than paper is. It is easier to search through job and property listings on the web, so classified advertising and its associated revenue is migrating onto the internet – news and share prices can be more easily updated, weather can be more geographically specific – so readers are migrating, too. The package is thus being picked apart.” Many blamed recessionary times following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2007. But the extent of the problem was more serious. Three years into the financial crisis, internet and TV revenues had begun to recover but the line on the revenues for most quality newspapers in 2010 were either static or down, with the Guardian dropping by 5% compared with five years earlier and even News International, including revenues from the Sun, Britain’s best-selling newspaper down by 2 per cent.
Monetising the media in a digital world
After a halting start, many print organisations have fought back with high quality online operations of their own. On the face of it the figures look impressive. Some 39m UK unique users visited news and information websites in August 2011. However they spent only an average of 2 mins 20 seconds a day (compared with the estimated average time of up to 40 minutes spent on reading a national quality paper). A pioneer in quality content in this area has been the Guardian/Observer which, in July 2012 was claimed to be the world’s third most popular newspaper website (after Mail Online and the New York Times (21). But impressive though this might sound, digital news supply is a further cost burden to traditional print-based media. The consultancy Enders Analysis points out that for a quality title, a paywall subscriber is worth, at best, a quarter to a third of a print buyer. Costs of digital news supply are on top of the costs of print, leading to dual costs in any print to digital transition.
So, with a perfect storm of recession, the flight of advertising, declining circulations and the lack of a viable model to monetise the product, media organisations have flirted with a number of different strategies.
i. Paywalls The most widely deployed – and controversial – model has been to erect a “paywall”, whereby users are charged for accessing online content. Three British daily quality newspapers – The Times and the Financial Times and the Telegraph titles now charge for accessing content online, although the Telegraph’s model is limited to overseas users and provides a generous 20 free views, in a similar model to the New York Times. However, there is no evidence that this provides an enduring means of monetising quality news for the future. Online readerships, if they are not accompanied by a print subscription, can “cannibalise” the print edition, eroding circulation and reducing the rates for advertising, which are much lower online. Nor is there evidence that paywall revenues will ever make up for the continuing collapse in print advertising. The Canadian media commentator Matthew Ingram neatly epitomises the problem, declaring that paywalls are “by definition a stopgap strategy…newspapers that rely on a paywall to save their bacon are likely doomed”(23). He goes on: “While it’s true that publications like the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the Economist have managed it, this isn’t a strategy that every newspaper is going to be able to duplicate, since these outlets have a very targeted readership (and therefore higher value advertising). Even the New York Times arguably falls into a separate category, since it is a leading brand, not just for national news but for international news. It is worth noting that even the New York Times’s paywall which has been hailed a success for signing up about 300,000 paying customers…has not improved the fortunes of the newspaper in a significant way.” In a British context the same applies to the The Times’s paywall, which offers far less access than the relatively relaxed model adopted by the Daily Telegraph in Britain and the New York Times in the US. Ingram suggests that better online growth might be achieved by offering non-news products such as e-books and by running events that draw readers to “real-world” get-togethers.” He adds that another promising strategy is to “look at your newspaper not as a thing you need to charge people for, but as a platform for data and information that you can generate value from in other ways – including by licensing it to developers and other parties via an open application programming interface.” Both these approaches seem to be favoured by the Guardian in Britain, which has had some success in extending its brand through an ambitious events programme, including its Masterclasses, in a range of areas from fiction-writing weekends to cookery classes. Ingram asserts: “An API-based platform strategy is a gamble, just as erecting a paywall is. But one of these is a gamble aimed at profiting from the open exchange of information and other aspects of an online media world, while the other is an attempt to create the artificial information scarcity that newspapers used to enjoy.”
ii. Free newspapers. In some niche markets print has experienced a limited revival through the distribution of free copies. The free daily newspaper Metro, with 1.38m copies handed out in London and ten other regional centres, made more than £20m profit in 2011. It describes its formula as “facts, not spin, sound-bitey expresso-shot rather than long-form content, use of images, use of white space and with frictionless access”. Another success has been the free London Evening Standard. When the ailing paper went free in October 2009, it was failing to sell at a cover price of 50p and on the point of closure. In 2012, it reported a profit of £1m. However free newspapers need a critical mass of relatively affluent readers in compact urban centres – preferably commuters at railway stations. The model does not easily translate. An interesting “halfway house” has been the i newspaper, launched in October 2010, consisting of pared down copy derived from its sister paper The Independent, presented in accessible “bites” and selling at the reduced price of 20p.
iii. The web-only newspaper. In the United States, the online and left-leaning Huffington Post, a news website, aggregator and blog has achieved success, winning a Pulitzer Prize and achieving sufficient worth that it was bought out in 2011 by AOL. However it has been criticised for a paucity of quality original content. Another online “newspaper to achieve some success in the US is The Daily Beast, founded by the British journalist Tina Brown in 2008. Another online-only paper called The Daily was launched by Rupert Murdoch in New York in February 2011, differing from his other online platforms in that it took the form of an app for a tablet computer . But it was a flop, publishing its last edition in in December 2012, having run up losses of $60m. Critics said that although it was the world’s first iPad-only newspaper it would not work in a world where consumers exected to get their news on the internet for free. No such enterprises have gained traction in the UK. More successful in terms of rivalling quality news output by the British print press have been political blogs, such as Guido Fawkes and Conservative Home. The blogger Paul Staines, behind the “Guido Fawkes” site, has broken a number of “scoops” such as the revelation of an extra-marital affair by the deputy leader of the Labour Party, John Prescott.
iv. Subsidies and levies. Although there are periodic calls for some kind of state funding to support the survival of quality newspaper journalism, particularly in the regional press, where it is possible that before too long wide areas of Britain may be left without a local newspaper, such calls seem destined to fail since the state-funded BBC is already deemed to fulfil this role. An alternative model has been to impose a £2 levy on the monthly bills of UK broadband providers. The money would then be distributed to news providers in proportion to their online readerships. However there are many pitfalls, such as persuading ISPs such as Virgin or BT to become, effectively, tax collectors. And how would news organisations be made accountable for what they do with the money?
v. Philanthropic, externally funded journalism. As shrinking news budgets have curtailed the ability of newspapers to fund expensive investigations, they have turned to other sources. One such has been the not-for-profit Bureau of Investigative Journalism, established at the City University in London and funded by such bodies as Save the Children and the philanthropic Potter Foundation. However its reputation was seriously tarnished when it was responsible for a story on BBC’s Newsnight on November 2, 2012, wrongly implying the former Conservative Party chairman Lord McAlpine was a paedophile. The report led to the resignation of the BBC chairman George Entwhistle and a crisis of confidence at the BBC.
vi. Crowdfunded journalism. Although the idea of public donations funding quality journalism may seem far-fetched, a digital project in San Francisco called “Matter” raised $128,000 from 2,400 members of the public in 2012 for a fund to publish high-quality, in-depth journalism about science and technology, although there have not been any similar projects in the UK.
vii. NGOs fill a gap. With funding limited for big investigations, reputable pressure groups and charities have filled a gap with investigations of their own. Whether it is the Children’s Society providing data on young runaways or Greenpeace highlighting environmental concerns, properly researched data has added to the armoury of quality newspapers. For instance, in November 2012, the Guardian led the newspaper on a Greenpeace investigation in which a Conservative Party candidate had been secretly filmed supporting an anti-wind turbine rival in a parliamentary by-election.
Harnessing new technologies – do they add to quality?
Many have suggested that instead of eroding or dumbing down quality, new ways of “telling stories”, especially through blogging and social media, can enhance and invigorate quality in the newsgathering process. Blogging by journalists in the print and traditional broadcast media has been a powerful new tool for those who might have found their voices limited by constraints of space or controls by editors. One of the biggest stories of the world banking crisis that developed after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2007 was broken by a print journalist who had joined the BBC as a business editor. Robert Peston, chose to reveal his knowledge that the British bank, Northern Rock, was about to collapse, not through traditional media, but through his daily blog on the BBC’s website. It was effective since it was filed early in the morning as the markets were opening – too late for the newspapers and with too informal a source to make the main broadcast new bulletins. The consequences were far-reaching as customers queued around the block to withdraw their money as a result of the first British bank collapse for 150 years, and the government was forced to set up a compensation scheme.
Other forms of social media – notable Twitter – have frequently been cited as a new weapon in the armoury of news-gathering. Twitter – in which users transmit a message by mobile phone or computer in no more than 140 characters – has been seen as both cheaper and more authentic than traditional reporting, particularly when a big news story breaks in a distant part of the world, where traditional media do not have the resources to interview a large number of witnesses. It first came to fore after the bombing by terrorists of hotels in Mumbai in 2008, and has since been effectively deployed by journalists monitoring a vast range of events, from the so-called “Arab Spring” to the American presidential elections of 2012, where journalists harnessed its crowd-sourcing capabilities to try to calculate the results before they were declared. However, Twitter has many drawbacks as far as verifiable, quality journalism is concerned. The Guardian in London reported how the tropical storm Sandy on the east coast of America in late October 2012 was “the first grave natural disaster to occur in the Twitter era”. The newspaper’s reporter Patrick Kingsley wrote that “false rumour after false rumour was retweeted as fact”. He cited some examples “‘Twitter is truly amazing,’ tweeted one Marc Chambers, musing how the police could stay in touch with flood victims via social media. He was right about Twitter, though probably not in the way it was meant: his tweet was mangled and retweeted by a tech journalist with 38,000 followers who briefly suggested that the NYPD had encouraged people to tweet them them rather than call 911. Pretty soon, people were stating it as fact: 911 is down – tweet the police instead! Truly amazing indeed.” Another mischief-maker uploaded a picture of a great white shark allegedly swimming along the Hudson river. The result was panic. However it turned out to be a hoax, with the picture nothing more alarming than a still from the disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow. The limitations of Twitter as a reliable source, and worse, as a means of exacerbating the dissemination of inaccurate information were exposed in the wake of the Newsnight fiasco mentioned above, when Iain Overton, editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which produced the flawed BBC programme, tweeted that the show would talk about a “very senior political figure who is a paedophile”. This false information was retweeted more than 1,500 times.
Another much vaunted tool of the new era has been so-called “citizen journalism” – whereby members of the public construct their own new websites or file copy to traditional media. Although some regional newspapers have encouraged this, and some small weekly papers and hyperlocal websites use it as a sole source of newsgathering or to augment the work of their own journalists, it has had limited impact. There have been some brave experiments in empowering ordinary citizens to become journalists – notably “Bespoke” run by the Uclan School of Journalism’s Paul Egglestone, in which residents of a deprived estate in the Lancashire town of Preston, were trained to produce their own newspaper and website. But “citizen journalism” as a form of quality input has been distrusted by media professionals and widely regarded as unreliable and – unfairly or not – undermining the standards of of a profession nearly all of whose members have had some form of institutional training. As if to prove the point, no publication has yet been set up in the UK using citizen journalists that would challenge the mainstream model.
Amid the uncertainty the Telegraph Media Group, owned by the Barclay brothers – Scottish entrepreneurs most of whose outside interests are in property – stands out as last quality, non-specialist, news organisation in the UK still confidently making a profit from without cross-subsidy. The modern offices above Victoria Station centre around a purpose built multi-media newsroom with a “spoke and hub” structure, innovative when it was constructed in 2005 and probably not surpassed in practicality by anything built since. I joined the editing team to observe the Telegraph Media Groups converged 24-hour operation during the third week of November 2012, a busy time in the run-up to Christmas, one of the peak periods in the year when advertising is pushing up pagination and the news agenda was dominated by three big events – an attack by Israel on Gaza, the British Prime Minister David Cameron’s negotiations over the EU budget and an historic vote by the synod of the Church of England on whether to ordain women as bishops – a traditional subject in the Telegraph hinterland.
The round-the clock coverage of the Gaza crisis demonstrated how far the organisation has moved from its’s traditional role as a once-a-day newspaper. Afterwards, I interviewed the executive editor of the Daily Telegraph, Mark Skipworth, one of the handful of senior editors responsible for the paper, with special responsibility for the supplements and also the Saturday edition. Skipworth refuted notions that somehow the transition from print to digital was leading to a diminution in quality and that the commitment to quality specialist journalism was somehow less. Although his responsibilities range across the entire operation, answering directly to the editor, Skipworth’s direct responsibility is the supplements – property, books, motoring property, gardening and so on – as well as the Saturday edition, which he edits. “It’s multi-section juggernaut of a paper and currently has around 11 sections ranging from travel, property, gardening motoring and the very successful Weekend section, which is difficult to define. It was one of the original, groundbreaking Saturday sections when Saturday papers started to become more like Sundays a couple of decades ago. It’s full of surprises every week, unlike the other sections where reader expectations are usually fulfilled. With the weekend section, you are never quite sure what you are going to get on the front page.”
Skipworth describes the weekly production cycle as follows: “Because of the sheer size of the paper, from Wednesday onwards I sign off four of the sections, i sign off another three on the Thursday and then on the Friday going into Saturday which are the live sections – sport, business and news. On Monday I sign off the magazine. There are many staff working in this system, I have eight people reporting directly to me, which are all the section heads and beneath them they have teams varying in size from two-man specialist desks to other desks with six or seven specialists. There are literally hundreds of writers and production staff that we use – some are staff, others are on retainers, others are pure freelances. Because of the way the Telgraph is now integrated it is hard to distinguish their roles form others they might hold within the paper. No longer are there fiefdoms as used to be the case in former times. the way we achieve quality is through flexibility. People who provide content work mostly across the Telegraph. There are very small numbers of people who are section-specific, compared with those producing the whole of the product. And that includes the Sunday. The hub is the key to this flexibility. As the week progresses i get mor involved in how the news is coming together for Saturday. I’ll join the hub as I need to, but we are fine-tuning this compared with how it was when we first set up the integrated newsroom. I sit very close to the head of news and we talking all the time during the week. All this works well because the structure is so informal. I won’t, for example, go and sit in on a leader conference just for the sake of it.
Efficiency is the key to all the changes we have made to the Telegraph over the past five or six years. It’s now incredibly efficient. At one time a newspaper executive like myself might sit in a glass walled office and ponder great thoughts. Now I have the freedom to move around. Contrary to some descriptions of modern newsroom, I don’t need to sit at the hub all the time. I do so when I choose to. but this is wher the best conversations take place. Here’s how far things have changed – I must emphasise without any loss of quality. Whe I first came her five years ago, we had a separate online team – descrete from editorial and two separate news lists. On the face of it these things don’t sound terribly radical, but we asked the question: “what’s the point of this ridiculous duplication?” In future, we would have one news group, which was both digital and print. Having done that, we sent out a symbolic symbol to all the staff that they were now expected to work for both print and online 24-7, except for a small handful who are specifically dedicated to a particular edition, suc as the Sunday paper. The next thing to come up: Who goes first in conference. At first this sounds like an amazingly simple thing to decide and determine, but when you think about-it, what we had initially that we would sit down and discuss first what would happen in print. We spent a lot of time discussing this.. The web was a kind of after thought. Considering it so sent all the wrong signals. In the past 18 months we have overhauled that system and are now “web-first”. Print now flows out of these conversations. But it’s not always so. Some things work better in print than online. Plucking a figure out of the air, there’s probably a 90 per cent overlap. Although you could more or less produce the paper from the digital discussions.
Thinking about the Telegraph culture, the sense of moving out what you might call the “old school” – senior and older journalists who might have been with the paper along time, as has happened with many titles, hasn’t occurred at the Telegraph as much as you might think. the reality was that when we moved to the integrated structure, some of the people who wouldn’t embrace it, surprising enough were the younger people we had recruited for online duties. Some of whom you might call the greybeards where actually the most dynamic in embracing the new system because they had been frustrated for many years that they hadn’t been able to write more than they could get into print. so actually, they felt quite liberated. Have we created efficiencies though a great deal of internal turmoil. Well, it is certainly true that there has been a great deal of upheaval, but it hasn’t been an issue of ageism or sexism. It’s been a matter of approaching the staff and saying: Are you up for it or not. Curiously, it doesn’t break down on age grounds.
“Some have argued that the demands of the 24-hour news cycle have diluted quality. It’s certainly a very good question. Obviously we know that to do it well news costs money. It’s an expensive commodity. To do it over 24 hours consistently well is a big ask. But the great resource we have are our offices around the world, so when we go to sleep, we hand over the editing function to our offices on the West Coast of America. So LA covers for us during our downtime. so it’s perfectly possible in this global era to cover things – maybe not as well as from the UK office, but cover things we do. The eight-hour time difference works well for maintaining full 24-hour coverage.
“But here are some other things. Far from cutting back, the Telegraph has invested in what is the expensive end of journalism. For instance, we never had an investigations unit. Now we have and very successful it is, too. For instance on today’s front page we have yet another revelation in the sage of the MPs expenses scandal which was broken by this newspaper. For us the evidence is that, contrary to some assertions, great news stories do sell newspapers.
Or news and content strategy is that news and scoops are our best marketing material. they get you talked about. In that senses, nothing has really changed. We are operating in the way that the best newspapers have operated for generations. We’ve made sensible economies aided by new technologies, such as outsourcing the production of some of our supplements. Before the desks do the final editing they are sent out of house for what you might call rough-subbing. This enables our desk chiefs to polish them up. It used to be in Australia, but it’s now in Chiswick. The sub-editors are nearly all former Fleet Street subs, vastly experienced. they’re just working in a different way. We have to work with a different copy-flow system, but provided the section heads are all good planners, which they are, then it works. Our section heads are all the equivalent of the old back bench. There are further things we could do. We could do more with templates, for instance. the whole template idea is very interesting. We are still doing, in my personal view, too much bespoke design. We are not yet taking templating to its logical conclusion, but I think its something we will want to look at.
The other thing that makes us successful is that we know our readers very well. Take the travel side for example. Our escorted tours do very well. Then there’s the other area which I would loosely call events. In this sense we are not so different from the Guardian – our demographic is not so dissimilar, except for perhaps the politics. They are all intelligent, articulate middle class people. Take Glyndebourne, which is as high end as you get. I saw some research the other day showing that while Guardian readers were the best represented of any newspaper-reading group in the audience, the Telegraph were second.This is where the print audience currently is mid fifities for print and early forties onwards for online. The tablet audience paradoxically attracts people who are reaer of the paper rather than browsers on the web.
Here’s another example of holding quality audiences. We recently took over the sponsorship of the Hay Festival Britian’s biggest literary festival, from the Guardian where it had been happily for ten years. Both the Hay organisers and we at the Telegraph were looking for growth and the partnership had pushed ticket sales up 20 per cent. What this shows is that the Guardian readers still go to Hay – in a sense this is the way forward for qulity pring journalism – building communities of like-minded people.
Effectively what we are trying to do here is to manage change. The big question that is often asked is: At what point do you flick the switch from being a print company with a digital arem to a digital company with a print arm. This occupies all our minds. In our view the Guardian have gone too far too fast and run down the paper unnecessarily. How to we still make money? The answer is because we are managing that change process better. And what about young people? Everything I see about young people is that they are news junkies. Just because they are young does not mean they are less interested in news per se. It may sound like marketing speak, but we still have superb, unbeatable content, in common with our fellow UK titles. We do words better than everybody elso. We make quality content and our job is to deliver it in whatever way is best. I can’t see any reader why we should not continue to thrive with this, as we currently do.. As for the doomsayers – well, in the so-called good times of the eighties, we lost a whole raft of newspapers. Over the past few years, in the worst recession for more than a century, we haven’t lost a single one
A doomed future for quality print?
Given the inexorable decline of both circulations and revenues, it is unsurprising there have been many doomsayers for quality print. The Guardian’s media commentator Emily Bell, now an academic at the Columbia School of Journalism in New York, has spoken of “carnage”, with five or six British newspaper titles disappearing or consolidating with others. “Who is most at risk?” she speculated in 2008. “When I met a senior news executive from another news organisation two years ago he foresaw something worse. He privately opined that in the long term the news International titles would survive because of the robust focus and funding of Rupert Murdoch’s parent company, that the Associated titles – the Mail and Mail on Sunday were likewise on firm ground, and that the Guardian titles, because of the Scott Trust purpose and funding of the parent company would all live on, as would the FT because of its brand equity and focus. But the medium to long-term future for all other titles would be questionable.”
Whether this prediction is right or not, the demographics are not on the side of newspaper publishers. Newspaper reading habits have come under huge pressure from the increasing choice UK adults have about how to spend their leisure time. According to a survey carried out by Ofcom in 2010 , TV is the favourite medium of choice for adults with 45% of time spent, followed by the internet, with 22% of time spent. Print media consume just 7% of time. Young adults spent more time on the internet (30%) and less time on TV (32%) than adults as a whole and multitask as well. Only 4 per cent of 16 to 24 year olds regularly consume print media. The survey showed that buyers and readers of print media are aging, while the digitally engaged lose interest in print media. Although it has been argued by some that as younger readers mature, they will migrate to newspapers from social media in what is known as the Radio 2 effect – whereby a dying older audience has been successfully replaced by a maturing younger one, acquiring the same tastes. However, the flaw with this theory is that radio listeners are constantly “sampling” the product as their tastes change and mature, while those growing up in households where a daily newspaper is no longer bought cease to have exposure to print media and thus do not replicate the reading habits of the previous generation. In a survey of students at the University of Central Lancashire in 2011, Michael Williams reported that of 150 third-year undergraduate journalism students surveyed, only 10 per cent admitted to reading a newspaper at all – although most of these were “quality” papers such as the Guardian.
However, this takes no account of technical advance, further pursuit of which may produce new solutions in a similar way to that in which tablet devices and apps have revolutionised the way we use computers. One exciting possibility are experiments with so-called “interactive newsprint”, involving the development of a new kind of paper that would give access to content through “touch” in a similar fashion to tablet screens. One such research project is being developed by a team at School of Journalism in the University of Central Lancashire, along with the University of Surrey and other institutions. The London School of Economics analyst Charlie Beckett believes that rather then dying, quality journalism is simply changing: “There has always been an oversupply of material that most people did not want. The on-demand world tells us precisely what people will really consume. The days of hundreds of hacks all attending the same press conferences and churning out very similar stories is over. Every platform has to add something: quality, quantity, speed, intelligence, amorality, campaigning, investigation, wit.This means that new jobs and organisations are emerging And journalism is increasingly being created beyond the media profession. The citizen does not want to become a journalist. They have other things to do. But they are contributing a vast amount of deliberate and “accidental” journalism. Much of this is done interactively with mainstream media but there’s also a vast amount of reporting, comment and analysis happening to social networks and other non-professional platforms that counts as a kind of journalism. Much of it is trivial but some of it is also highly serious and expert.”
Another optimist is Steven Barnett, Professor of Communications at the University of Westminster, who says: “Our research suggests that newspapers may have a longer shelf life than many believed possible and that the model of the cinema – adapting to the television age but not being overwhelmed by it – may be the more appropriate analogy…There will certainly be continued circulation decline. But the evidence suggests that just as cinema-going declined until the 1980s and then bottomed out and rose again, newspapers will find their plateau. In cultural and consumer terms, as long as the newspaper industry can continue to offer something of real journalistic substance, out data suggests that it will continue to find a willing and substantial readership.”
It’s a view supported by the world’s most powerful newspaper owner, Rupert Murdoch, who says: “Great journalism will always be needed but the product of their work may not always be on paper it may ultimately just be electronically. But for many, many, many years to come it will be disseminated on both. There will always be room for good journalism and good reporting. And a need for it to get the truth out.”
Peter Cole and Tony Harcup, of the Department of Journalism Studies at the University of Sheffield comment wryly on the doomsayers in their book Newspaper Journalism. They declare: “Philip Meyer in his book The Vanishing Newspaper predicts that the last newspaper will be dead in 2043 By that time he is likely not only to be dead, but also wrong.”
