The Cairncross Review and the 65m elephants trampling all over what’s left of your newsroom
Audiences are rapidly moving online and those that aren’t might not be around much longer — shouldn’t ‘the press’ listen better to people that buy or rely on them?
The Cairncross Review is the government’s investigation into ‘how to sustain the production and distribution of high-quality journalism in a changing market’. During the call for evidence, experts were asked for their views on everything from the current state of the market and threats to financial sustainability, to the role of tech giants, data and digital ads. And, crucially, how we will know we have been successful.
I’ve already highlighted a lack of reference to our global environmental issues and warned about the lack of definition of terms. But, for me, there are further serious omission from this discussion.
The 12-person panel selected to assist former economic journalist Dame Frances Cairncross in identifying challenges and making recommendations has been criticised for lacking adequate representation of all sorts of groups — no one from the National Union of Journalists, no academics, no local journalists, no one from the BBC, no one from local government, the list goes on.
Of course, too many panellists is more like a party — but what’s pretty glaring for me is the absence of anyone representing the varied ‘audience’ that makes up our Great British public.
“Our analysis has identified serious structural challenges facing the press industry, as UK consumers engage increasingly with online content across a range of connected devices,” explains the Mediatique report produced for the review. “As a result, consumption habits have shifted significantly away from the printed press towards greater online engagement where the economics of newsgathering and monetisation of audiences are more challenging. These habits will persist and deepen, as younger connected cohorts grow older.”
The report rather clinically describes ‘consumers’, ‘consumption’, ‘propensity to pay’, ‘circulation revenue’, ‘data-tracked engagement’ and more, without actually establishing whether ‘the press’ is something people think is worth paying for.
The team conducted interviews with ‘national and local publishers, newspaper trade and marketing associations, regulators, academics, digital intermediaries, digital news publishers’, but the question of what audiences might want or need, in any specific sense, didn’t make the set of questions released to the public.
As if to emphasise those “serious structural challenges”, since the review launched one of its experts, Ashley Highfield, has departed his role as the CEO of Johnston Press. And since then, the top-three regional publisher has been put up for sale, having fallen ‘prey to capitalism and greed’ according to Guardian media commentator Roy Greenslade.
“Johnston Press is a strong and resilient business, with good profits and strong profit margins, great people and prestigious titles,” its former chief financial officer and new CEO David King told the Guardian, making no visible mention of the people that read, pay for and potentially rely on his business.
Hip, young, diverse or poor elephants?
Having dug around the internet for information about our expert panel, I’d say it counts one, perhaps two millennials — people born between 1981 and 1996 — among its ranks. That’s Quartz reporter Akshat Rathi who started university in 2004, making him around 33; plus, just about, head of public policy at the Guardian Matt Rogerson, having gone to university four years earlier.
Rathi, as it happens, holds a PhD from Oxford University, while Rogerson started his working life as a researcher in Westminster for once-controlling-cappuccino-man, now-hipster-bearded Shadow Minister for Digital Liam Byrne.
The Mediatique report produced for the review finds that in fact “traditional newsbrands’ online reach among 18–24s is slightly higher than the overall population reach — with the exception of The Daily Express and The Times”.
Perhaps for obvious reasons no ‘post-millennials’, who are a sprightly 21 or younger, made it onto the ‘expert’ panel, but given that “younger connected cohorts grow older”, this could be something of an oversight.
Post-millennials do not know life without mobile phones and social media. They are spoiled with cheap information, and most have been found to be unable to tell the difference between real and fake new. But apart from those aged 18 to 21 polled for the Cairncross Review by Yougov in a sample of 2020 UK adults, their voice is pretty absent.
A cursory look on the web shows that kids as young as five are making it as YouTube stars. Now, I’m not saying ‘get PewDiePie on your expert panel’. But perhaps having the most successful YouTube star ever, now resident in the UK, as part of a review that has to find someone or some way to pay for digital content in the future could offer some insight into successfully building audiences in the 21st century.
Or it could, at least, give our experts a greater understanding of the battle for hearts, minds and attention that needs to be waged.
People from ethnic minorities are the second largest audience for online news after the young, presenting a whole other problem for our monocultural newsrooms — another issue not explicitly being tackled by Cairncross’ ‘sustainability’ review, although its panel is more ethnically diverse than many boardrooms.
People from poorer ‘C2DE’ backgrounds, likewise, are the second smallest audience for newspapers after the youth, another sign that the press isn’t speaking to people it doesn’t understand.
Young at heart elephants
It must be quite conflicting for an industry that’s dragging itself into digital that it also has such a large amount of people who don’t use the internet for news at all — of 11.8 million over 65s (ONS 2016), almost 5 million do not get news online according to the Ofcom data. On top of that, almost the same amount don’t read newspapers either.
It’s television, the medium that raised a generation, that holds baby boomers’ hearts — although of all consumption habits represented across the UK — these tastes are certain to die first.
Among various gloomy predictions, the Mediatique report warns that, if something doesn’t change, we could be presented with “an outcome where citizens are left with no professionally produced news at all beyond the BBC”.
Unhappily for the press, when asked by Ofcom for its News Consumption Survey 2018, the BBC scores above 70 per cent for being ‘high quality’, ‘trustworthy’, ‘accurate’ and helping people understand the world.
Those industry-leading figures haven’t stopped the broadcasting regulator announcing last week a new and separate media review to Cairncross that will aim to understand whether the BBC is fulfilling its responsibility “to provide impartial news and information to help people understand and engage with the world around them”.
When asked by Yougov about newspaper brands for the government’s polling done for the Review, meanwhile, 47 per cent said its quality had declined over the past five years.
Although our civic society institutions certainly don’t represent the entire British public, someone from Citizens UK, the National Union of Students or the Trades Union Congress would have made great candidates for a review attempting to understand what a broad range of people think.
Trumpeting what’s at stake
A key question for me is, do the public, as the scope of the review assumes of its own topic, believe, understand or care that “robust high quality (sic) journalism is important for public debate, scrutiny, and ultimately for democratic political discourse”?
If so, do they appreciate what it costs to produce? Do they believe traditional news brands can fulfil this role? And, crucially, are they willing to pay for it? And, if they don’t believe in the need for ‘good’ journalism, well we can all go home now…
Referencing the Reuters Digital News Report 2017, Mediatique says that the UK has the lowest proportion of adults that pay for online news across 12 comparable international markets; just 6 per cent of people, with 3 per cent paying subscriptions, plus another 3 per cent paying by other means.
The same Reuters report finds that, across all markets it surveyed, the top reasons for paying, if people do, are: to get mobile access, to access a range of sources and because they were offered a good deal. ‘Because journalism is important for public debate’ did not make the list.
In a very non-representative poll I conducted among my Facebook friends, I asked whether anyone had heard of the government’s Cairncross Review; 110 largely millennial people responded, only five had and four of those were involved in the media.
For an industry in the business of communication, the message that ‘high-quality journalism’ might be under threat doesn’t appear to be making it to those who ultimately have to pay its bills, whether directly via subscriptions, indirectly with their eyeballs, or something more creative.
The Mediatique report writers were not ‘asked to consider public policy options, as these will be reviewed by Dame Frances Cairncross as part of her review’, so structural solutions are not included in this latest public report.
Below, though, are just a couple of ideas, which I haven’t found in any submissions, that might help:
- A digital skills campaign like those done rather well by our tech giant rivals to help those that aren’t yet accessing news online — which might give the boost that digital audience figures need to make digital pennies into digital pounds
- A ‘buy print’ campaign targeting young people that are sick of mindlessly scrolling, helping newspapers make a comeback like vinyl and books — how about using that network of news agents, those ‘frontline’, print distributors, so well neglected by the media industry
What better industry to change its positioning, its standing among the public, than one whose role it is to inform, educate and entertain that very public?
