How the media in the UK is changing

This is a tricky time to be a writing journalist in the UK. Fewer and fewer of us are in full-time jobs, and the jobs we are in bear only a very oblique relation to the jobs we were in a few years ago.

Sub-editors have become webmasters; writers have become bloggers; reporters have become TV presenters; generalists have become specialists and specialists generalists; and many many instances of all of the aforementioned have in the last few months become unemployed. Or "freelance", as we prefer to call it.

Fleet Street has changed - in a matter of five years or so -- out of all recognition. When I joined my old newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, in 1999, the process by which it was put together, give or take a certain amount of computerisation, was the process by which it had been put together a century previously.

That is (in very crude outline): the staff showed up in the morning, decided what was going to go in the next day's paper, pulled it together, pressed a big button marked "print" in the evening, and went to the pub.

Now, the newspaper runs pretty much 24 hours a day. News reporters are filing several versions of each story - a first take for the web, followed by a series of updates of which the version for the following day's paper is only one -- and perhaps even pulling together a visual package for online TV. Instant commentary will be expected; specialists will be blogging responses; picture galleries and related bells and whistles will jangle and tweet prettily about the whole assemblage.

Depending on which newspaper's newsroom you are in, the writer will be expected to handle more or fewer of the tasks that previously would have fallen under the remit of the sub-editors or designers. Readers - subscribing to RSS feeds, blogging on their paper's own site, kicking their heels in our vertical silos - are now "customers", and demanding ones at that.

This is by no means to say that these changes are a bad thing. These customers are in many respects getting something much much better than they used to; they are certainly getting something more competitive. But it's hard to overstate how different what they are getting is, and how much more different it is likely to become if the commercial wind continues to blow in this direction.

What has brought the change about? The truth is that even during the boom, old-style print newspapers were struggling. Rolling TV news and the internet were providing much of the information newspapers provided faster, and more cheaply if not free. The blogosphere was competing with newspapers to offer political and social commentary - and it was doing so in a way that was pleasingly interactive.

The costly business of gathering news, verifying it, and selling it as part of an integrated package was no longer looking like a business model. Why bear the cost of maintaining a permanent bureau in a foreign territory, when anyone interested has the breaking news from a Google alert, or demotix.com or even Twitter before your man has got out of bed and pulled his trousers on?

Circulations were shrinking. Shrinking circulations mean shrinking newsstand revenues - but more important, they mean shrinking advertising sales, which are what actually finance the industry. As advertisers found themselves with a plethora of new ways to reach their audiences - from multi-channel television and digital radio to the internet in all its forms - the slice of the pie available for display advertising in dead-tree media shrank.

With the advent of recession, though, the size of the pie itself was drastically reduced. It was no longer a pie. It was a cup-cake, and rapidly on its way to being a small, Alan-Bennett-style rock bun. What had been a slow moan of pain from the newspaper industry has, abruptly, become a death-rattle.

It isn't much of an exaggeration to say that an internet-nursed generation is now growing up which simply doesn't see what the point of a newspaper is - still less one you're expected to pay for. Newspaper managements were faced, as I understand it, with two options: beat them, or join them.

Either you could take the view - as elite titles like the Financial Times and the Economist have - that in a media environment of a million lunatics shouting, your cachet is to be the still small voice of calm. You move upmarket, and make your authority your selling point to a niche of discerning, cash-rich, time-poor customers.

Or - as middlebrow publications like the Times, Telegraph and Mail titles are doing with equally good reason - you can try to compete; using the strength of your existing brand to build market position, even while you turn it into something else. You run the print paper as an outlier of a website that updates news moment by moment. You offer television clips and blogs and chatrooms and dating services and celebrity photo galleries and personalised feeds, and you seek to get a big slice of the available internet traffic in the hopes that eventually someone figures out how to make money from it.

Unfortunately, nobody yet has. Across the board, then, there is fierce commercial pressure to cut costs (I speak as one who knows, having been made redundant from my old paper just before Christmas) -- at the same time as the amount of space to fill grows by the day.

At its worst, this produces what Nick Davies, in his gloomy but perceptive book Flat Earth News, calls "churnalism": gangs of reporters frantically rewriting press-releases, wire copy and stories from other newspapers without having time to make even a cursory attempt at original reporting.

But it does also, inevitably, provide opportunities. Most of the major newspaper groups have shed staff with the advent of recession; most, even though their print pagination may have fallen, are still looking to produce more content. A freelance who can work well fast and to a tight brief will find a market for his or her work. I've found that by working a lot rather than demanding a high rate per word, I've made out all right so far.

But it's hard to be optimistic about the future of an industry where across the board people are being paid less and less to work harder and harder, and the reward for experience is more likely to be a P45 than a promotion. To anyone in his or her teens or early twenties thinking of starting a career in newspapers, I'd say: think hard.

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READERS' COMMENTS

Very interesting
Posted by Oliver Fetiveau on Thursday 5 February 2009 at 22:46 UAE time


Another point about 'churnalsim': in addition to the dumbing down of the journalistic process - it can get journos in trouble too. We are libel lawyers and increasingly find ourselves defending claims for clients who are recycling stories from other stories and who in the rush to be first out of the blocks perhaps don't take the requisite steps to verify the story: as such the Claimant simply picks the most cash-rish victim. Happy days, if you're defamed.

Changing media
Posted by David, Dubai on Thursday 5 February 2009 at 13:00 UAE time


Great article Sam, vey interesting reading indeed!

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