Life in the old dog

Many thanks to Stu Smith, our librarian at Leeds Met, for pointing me towards a recent report, from the analysts Generator Research, which indicates that there’s still money to be made in the news business.

The worldwide newspaper industry will grow from USD 114.3 billion in 2014 to USD 123.1 billion in 2018, an increase of 7.7%. While print advertising revenues will fall by 3.8%, from USD 64.5 billion in 2014 to USD 62.1 billion in 2018, revenues from copy sales, digital advertising and digital subscriptions will all increase. In developed internet markets the newspaper industry is experiencing a structural contraction which is being caused by digital technology and the internet. But in markets where the internet remains immature – India, Romania and the Philippines, for instance, traditional printed newspaper businesses are thriving. While publishers in mature markets will have to swallow a bitter pill, which will eventually see them downsizing or selling off their print operations, there has never been a better time for skilled writers, visionary publishers and savvy investors to get involved in the news business.

Claire Enders on the continuing power of the press

There was an interesting debate last week, in the wake of the Leveson Report, about the irelevance of the printed press in the age of the network society. It’s a topic I hear a lot among a few or our undergraduates who argue that “everyone is getting their news from Twitter”. Of all the words spoken about this last week, I thought Claire Enders articulated the opposite on Newsnight brilliantly :

The internet has a place and a role but actually the information it provides has a much greater reach if its on the newstands across the country; if its in every supermarket, in every every newsagent … Still there are 23 million people who are reading a physical newspaper everyday and that newspaper websites do comprise seven of the top 10 websites in this country … So I dispute — absolutely — the fact that the internet has the same reach and power of the printed press. Lord Leveson is not saying that the internet has now power , as we all know is false. In fact it has enormous reach, but it has a different impact on reputation here in the UK.

The current state of investigative journalism in the UK

Say what you like about George Entwistle’s pay off (and I think the poor bugger should keep the money), the child abuse scandal at Newsnight — which brought down the director general of the BBC comes at a rotten time for investigative journalism. The local press continues to decline, losing readers and the inclination to conduct proper investigative journalism beyond Freedom of Information requests. Lord Leveson is due to report back next week, and we can all expect some limits placed on the printed press. And now the BBC tearing itself arpart in a way that somehow reminds of Dali’s Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War), right. If, as commentators, such as Steve Hewlett have suggested, investigations get permanantly frozen out from Newsnight, and The World at One and the Today programme, at the BBC, one of the few institutions to be able to conduct proper investigative journalism in this country will be weakened quite dangerously. It is very worrying

So we finally learnt today that Jeremy Hunt thought that “our media sector will suffer for years” if Rupert Murdoch’s bid to takeover the whole of BSkyB was blocked by the government. Oh really? This being the same BSkyB that is already the UK’s leading supplier of both residential and business pay-TV services. The same company that led some analysts (Enders, 2011) to calculate that the company accounted for approximately two-thirds of UK residential subscribers to subscription pay-TV and about, wait for this, four-fifths of the sector’s market revenues last year. Let’s not forget, this is the very same BSkyB that dwarfs any other supplier in the market place, including the BBC. BSkyB enjoys revenues of £5.9bn. By comparison the BBC receives £2.4bn from the licence fee.

This is precisely what I don’t get about the free market ideology espoused by Mr Hunt. It creates nothing like a market that is free. On the contrary, as the Enders calculations indicate, it creates a monopoly that stifles competition. Markets don’t need to be free, rather they need to be regulated in order to allow competition to foster. As the economist Ha-Joon Chan has written: “when free market economists say that a certain regulation should not be introduced because it would restrict ‘freedom’ of a certain market [as in the BSkyB case], they are merely expressing an opinion … their ideological cloak is to pretend that their politics is not really political, but rather is an objective economic truth.” If Mr Hunt’s view that the BSkyB bid wouldn’t damage the media sector isn’t a political decision, I don’t know what is.

I’m a day late on this but I…

I’m a day late on this but I thought Amelia Hill article in yesterday’s Guardian (BBC unable to investigate hacking, says Patten) was telling about the way the BBC has been devalued in recent years.

Chris Patten: “As a publicly funded broadcaster whose output is so directly intrusive, there are some areas where we ought to be particularly careful in our journalism or even decline to follow where newspapers or online journalism may properly lead.”

Hello. Isn’t the BBC meant to be independent? Whose independence is protected by a Royal Charter? If a story, such a phone hacking, is in the public interest, then a public broadcaster should be free to report on it. End of.

Death of the News of the World

The abandoned News of the World offices and print hall, Wapping: A flickr set by Tim Burke

Peter Oborne of the Spectator on the phone hacking scandal.

Let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s imagine that BP threw an extravagant party, with oysters and expensive champagne. Let’s imagine that Britain’s most senior politicians were there — including the Prime Minister and his chief spin doctor. And now let’s imagine that BP was the subject of two separate police investigations, that key BP executives had already been arrested, that further such arrests were likely, and that the chief executive was heavily implicated.

Let’s take this mental experiment a stage further: BP’s chief executive had refused to appear before a Commons enquiry, while MPs who sought to call the company to account were claiming to have been threatened. Meanwhile, BP was paying what looked like hush money to silence people it had wronged, thereby preventing embarrassing information entering the public domain.

And now let’s stretch probability way beyond breaking point. Imagine that the government was about to make a hugely controversial ruling on BP’s control over the domestic petroleum market. And that BP had a record of non-payment of British tax. The stench would be overwhelming. There would be outrage in the Sun and the Daily Mail — and rightly so — about Downing Street collusion with criminality. The Sunday Times would have conducted a fearless investigation, and the Times penned a pained leader. In parliament David Cameron would have been torn to shreds.

Let me get this straight, just so I’ve got it right in my head. Rupert Murdoch gets to *keep* the same share holding – exactly – in Sky News as he currently enjoys, but gets to take control of the rest of BSkyB? And this will allow one foreign-owned company to be twice as big as the BBC.

In return Jeremy Hunt has managed to elicit the concession that one of Murdoch’s own family won’t be chair of the Sky News. And this is meant to protect media plurality and by extension our democracy.

Jeremy Warner, Torygraph:

So Rupert Murdoch has got his way – again. Not for the first time, the politicians have bent over backwards to accommodate News Corporation’s commercial ambitions. Not for the first time, all other voices have been roundly excluded from any say in the grubby little bargain that Britain’s most powerful media tycoon has managed to strike with a government apparently so desperate for the great man’s blessing that it’s willing to bend the rules to smooth his path.

As regulars will know, I’ve been looking at the i newspaper lately. I’ve liked it, but have accused it of being a bit lightweight and of marketing itself disingenuously. I stand by the latter, but now refute the former. I decided to look more closely at the news values, using a modest bit of content analysis using Harcup and O’Neill’s 10 point rule as a methodology. In spite of the paper’s frothy – as seen on TV – marketing campaign, the results surprised me.

Help! Save the BBC World Service

I was going to collate some reaction to the Daily – Rupert Murdoch’s new iPad “newspaper” – but Matthew Dyas beat me to it with this splendid piece.

Two media stories of note in the old G today

Thought Charlie Brooker was particularly apropos in his piece about the end of privacy:

We’ve entered an era in which private conversation is impossible. Ever since Gordon Brown was caught calling Gillian Duffy a bigot, the tape’s been left running. Paranoia is at an all-time high. MPs can no longer talk to their own constituents without suspecting they may be undercover reporters. Celebrities can’t listen to their voicemails without wondering if they have been transcribed and passed to the newsdesk. Football commentators can no longer yap like oafs in their downtime. Everyone has become a reality show contestant nervously awaiting their own Shilpa Shetty moment.

While elsewhere in the paper Adam Sherwin interviews Paul Staines, the blogger behind Guido Fawkes. I’m not fond of Staines – can’t stand him actually – but the article does place his achievements into context.

Since Guido’s Order-Order blog went live in 2004, it has exposed MPs’ petty expenses fraud, forced Peter Hain to resign from his cabinet post over undeclared campaign donations and, most spectacularly, brought down Damian McBride, Gordon Brown’s political enforcer, in the Smeargate affair.

I thought Jemima Kiss wrote a delightful piece of counterfactual journalism in yesterday’s Media Guardian: What might have happened if Viacom had bought MySpace

Why Twitter matters for media organisations, by Alan Rusbridger, Guardian editor (in 15 tweet-like points)

Good news. Uncle Vince has referred NewsCorp £12bn bid to take full control of BSkyB to Ofcon.

Some quite brilliant analysis by PR Week of the data coming out of Whitehall department regarding entertainment budgets. Who is entertaining whom? The Daily Mail is the most lunched paper by the coalition government.

Well at least David Cameron has found it within himself to apologise (sort of) to the BBC.