“Newsprint — It Ain’t Over Yet” — #CityNewsprint with Christian Broughton, Sarah Baxter, Roy Greenslade and Professor Jane Singer
I was at City University tonight for an event looking at whether there was still a future for print journalism. The tl;dr is obviously yes, but maybe in a slightly different shape to the world we know now. On the panel were Christian Broughton, Editor Independent Digital, Sarah Baxter, Deputy Editor The Sunday Times and Professor Jane Singer. Roy Greenslade was chair.
“We reach more hearts and minds than we ever have before” — Christian Broughton
Christian Broughton was talking mostly about The Independent’s recent decision to turn its back on print and become digital only. He talked a good game, saying that the digital side of the business has been profitable for three years, and that although regrettably jobs have gone at the title, he now has a bigger team of digital journalists than ever before.
He joked that he’d probably been put on the panel precisely to say that print is dead, but he feels like the weekly magazine market, and the free mass circulation market look robust. He thinks daily printed paid for news is in a difficult position, and that those titles need to think quite hard about the make-up of their content.
Christian was quite bullish about the state of the Independent’s journalism. Via the digital routes he said they “reach more hearts and minds than we ever have before” and that in their digital incarnation overseas reporting, war reporting, and campaigning journalism are alive and well. He cited mental health, for example, as an issue that really resonates with audiences on Facebook in a way that gets stories out to a wide audience.
On the business side, he made an astute point that rather than there being one true way to finance journalism, “the truth is you’ve got to make money from all the opportunities that digital brings.”
He cited Facebook Instant Articles, saying there’s good revenue there, and that they are reaching millions of people a day on that platform. I pulled a slight face about that figure.
Talking about metrics, he said it was vital for working out how to reach people and how to adapt stories to make sure they will reach an audience. Asked what changes the Indy had made off the back of seeing web usage stats, Christian said “We are writing fewer stories that people don’t read.”
Amen to that.
Asked about ad-blocking he said we perhaps hadn’t done a good job of explaining the value exchange to the user. “We send journalists to warzones,” he said, “keep them safe, then bring them back so they can tell us exactly what is happening. In return the reader just has to have an advert on their screen slightly to the side of the thing they are reading.”
I must say I don’t envy Christian Broughton’s job of trying to keep a newly digital-only Independent in the public eye and profitable digitally. But I suspect he doesn’t envy the financial situation at the Guardian, so let’s call that quits.
“Journalists are horses” —Professor Jane Singer
Alright I lied. Professor Singer did not say that journalists are horses. But she used a lengthy horse analogy as a way of thinking about the structure of the print journalism future. She talked about the number of horses in Britain. There were something like 3.3m of them at the turn of the 20th century, and 1m of them were working horses. By 1914, the number of working horses had collapsed. These days there are around 800,000 horses in the country. But these horses are loved and not workhorses. They are a luxury product. A status symbol.
Professor Singer suggested that this teaches us that an “elite press” will survive in print. The high end — she cited The Times, Guardian, The Economist — would continue to find an audience that wanted to pay for printed news and analysis as a premium product and “the kind of cachet that comes with them.”
She also thinks that “the downmarket press” will continue to have a healthy future. Red tops still sell resiliently in the UK, and as I’ve often thought, there are lots of situations — cafés, vans, people looking through the betting guide in the pub — where I just don’t see digital formats doing the job for a good while yet.
But Professor Singer is concerned for the print future of those titles that don’t fall into those two camps — the regional press and the middling mainstream titles that are struggling to have a USP in the market.
On the business model side of things, she reminded us that a lot of journalism in the US is funded philanthropically, a model which is maybe under-explored in the UK market.
I liked her horse analogy. But I’m not entirely convinced the idea that a whole chunk of us are headed for the knacker’s yard was as uplifting as she intended. Please don’t boil me down for glue just yet.
“We’re not giving up the whole business of breaking news, don’t worry” — Sarah Baxter
Like Christian, Sarah Baxter was also optimistic about her product. She said that the industry was in the process of a transition from print to digital, one she expected to continue for decades.
She argued that papers and brands like The Times or the BBC have earned trust over the years, and that’s true whether you are on the airwaves, in print, or on an app on a phone. The name of these big legacy news brands is enough to signal to the reader that a story about, for example, FIFA corruption, will be one where the journalists have done due diligence and can be trusted to be true.
At one stage, Sarah said, she thought the future looked pretty gloomy for the students coming out of places like City University, but now with new digital brands like Buzzfeed and Vice coming through, she thought employment prospects looked good.
She explained that the Times and Sunday Times had not given up on breaking news just because they had moved towards an editioned model. What we don’t want to do, she said, is quickly knock out versions of wire stories that frankly, she said, you can find elsewhere. They expect people to pay for their journalism, and in return they want to deliver the things that they think people value — investigations, analysis, trusted commentary.
Sarah still likes the idea of “the package” or “the bundle” that puts a whole load of things that people might be interested in together in a finite edition. She said “I love blogs. I love Twitter. But that tends to narrowcast me on my specific interests.”
As an industry, she said, we’re all trying to find the sweet spot where we can get news onto people’s phones, but also make money. The key to that, she said, was for news companies and journalists to “Stay nimble. Stay adaptable. Stay flexible. And keep making money.”
“Oh god I’m so bored of all the miserable doom and gloom” — Me, later, having thought about it all
I must confess that I’m long enough in the tooth to have sat through probably literally a zillion panel discussions on the future of journalism, and I’ll never tire of rolling my eyes at people who ask questions that basically boil down to “Journalism used to be wonderful and perfect and now the internet has ruined everything and made everything dumb and stupid and if you don’t print it out on a piece of paper nobody will hear your story.”
It’s absolute rubbish and it makes me really angry. Look at what people are doing around you. Wherever you are, you will see people glued to their phones. If you want to get your stories out to the public, it is so obvious that this is the place you have to get your story seen.
I don’t think it is a great time to own a newspaper, but I do think it’s a brilliant time to be a journalist, and in many ways I envy the crop of students coming out of City at the moment. They will have a totally different opportunity to tell stories than the one my generation had when starting out in the business.
Sure, there are less jobs. Yes, the business models are uncertain. But then honestly, hand on heart, point me to a period in the history of newspapers when they weren’t being massively disrupted by the arrival of television or new computer technology or a massive world war or somesuch external strife.
I can get my stories out to a bigger audience than I would ever get in print. I can tap the screen on my phone a couple of times and be instantly live-streaming video to tens of thousands of people who have explicitly told us they like the Guardian. I can find new ways to engage readers with interactivity so that I can lift stories from being worthy but dull, to being worthy but interesting and playful.
Someone tonight asked where “the journalists of the future™” are going to come from if there’s no longer the traditional route of working for a local paper to get your chops before moving to a national. And I thought of people like Dawn Foster and Rossalyn Warren and Federica Cocco who I recently saw win awards for their brilliant work and as far as I’m aware none of them started at a local newspaper and they are all absolute stars doing fantastic story-telling. Some of the questions asked by the students at the event were very smart, and I’d much rather listen to them asking questions than the boring grizzled old men like me chipping in.
Rich people have been paying other people to write down and explain “What the fuck just happened, and does it affect me?” for over 2,000 years. I don’t think that is going to stop being a thing.
But let’s be clear. Our industry is never going to settle down to a stable post-digital post-internet situation. Uncertainty is the new normal. The funding will continue to be a challenge. Printed newspapers will never again be the final arbiters of truth with the ability to gate-keep being “the paper of record”. Digital newsgathering gives us some ethical considerations that worry me.
But I’m optimistic about our industry. They will be viewed on a screen you can hold in the palm of your hand rather than on bits of paper, but the future of telling stories that are honest, truthful, passionate journalism that hold power to account is going to be just fine.
Martin Belam is Social & New Formats Editor for the Guardian in London. He helped set up UsVsTh3m and Ampp3d for the Daily Mirror, and has worked at Sony and the BBC. He is on Twitter as @MartinBelam. Every Friday he publishes a list of recommended reads about journalism and media.
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