Editor urges newsrooms to embrace reader revenue over ‘quids for clicks’
The editor of the Yorkshire Post has urged publishers to ditch the ‘clicks for quids’ model and work with advertisers to come up with a better way to support local journalism.
James Mitchinson said that reader revenue would become more important for local journalism, and those newsrooms which sought to properly engage with readers would prosper in the future.
Among the findings for this year, it revealed that:
- 55% of people in the UK trusted local newspapers or websites
- Only around 5% of people in the UK pay for local news in the UK
- Only 25% of people said they would miss their newspaper or website if it ceased to exist.
James told the seminar: “We’ve been too reticent as an industry to ask people to pay for journalism. For too long, we’ve been selling the wrong thing — advertising and not our journalism.
“We can create a virtuous circle, looking to create quality content for wholesome purposes.
“We have to move away from the ‘clicks for quids’ model. The advertising model, especially programmatic advertising, will increasing be of less importance than reader revenue.”
He urged publishers and advertisers to work together to ensure advertising rewarded high quality journalism.
At the moment, many newsrooms raise a lot of their revenue via programmatic advertising networks. Advertisers determine a type of audience they want to reach and draw on data from multiple sources to identify readers in real-time.
This means that a high-quality news outlet could be given equal parity with a clickbait farm, with little or no recognition of the quality of content an ad is appearing next to.
To complicate matters further, programmatic advertising makes significant use of blocked words filters, meaning stories containing words advertisers consider to be unsuitable for their brand, often see little premium advertising.
Often, words associated with ‘bad news’ stories are put on the block list, such as ‘coronavirus,’ making it even harder to mainstream publishers to sustain essential public interest journalism.
James said: “It just takes one significant chief executive [of a company] to say they aren’t going to support publications which celebrate the abuse of JK Rowling to change things.
“A responsible publishers group and a responsible advertisers’ consortium could make a huge difference to publishers. We need to start working together.”
James called on newsrooms to embrace engaging with readers, describing how the Yorkshire Post has to serve two very different sets of reader expectations across print and online.
He said: “Print readers can get offended when you challenge the Government. They tend to vote Conservative because their parents and grandparents did and they will tell me that now is not the time to be challenging and perhaps be more deferential.
“We also have readers who are newly emboldened, readers who are promiscuous with their media. They see a variety of media and keep looking until they get the answers. They want to play a part in the process and won’t be duped. Publishers who embrace that engagement will be successful.
“Programmatic advertising is a benign bedfellow. Reader revenue is not. It tosses and turns all night, and sometimes throws you out altogether, as the New York Times saw recently with its opinion editor.
“We need to use that engagement as the 12th player in our dressing room, at our conferences, to produce the journalism people want
“We need to rebuild trust. We need to focus on the right and the wrong, not on the left and the right.”
