IN A week when essentially no religious news was picked up in the mainstream media in Britain, I thought I’d look at the economics of the newspaper business. I have been writing this column for something like 27 years now, and, for the first seven years, nothing of financial importance changed.
In 2004, I’d have been spending about £650 a year, perhaps £700, buying the four broadsheets that then existed plus the Daily Mail, every day. This figure comes from a Press Gazette story pointing out how steadily newspaper prices have outstripped the rate of inflation since then. Over the next decade, my own costs plummeted, although the cover price of newspapers rose, as everything went online, and free.
By this spring, when the Press Gazette survey was published, the cover price of newspapers had soared far above general inflation, while, almost without exception, their circulations had halved. Their relative positions had hardly changed, although those that had raised their prices least had made small gains relative to the opposition in the shrunken markets.
As I wrote that sentence, a scene came back to me from the smoke-filled bar in Old Street where Independent journalists drank in early ’90s. We had just put the paper’s price up, and one of the executives was holding court from his usual throne at the end of the public bar.
We were, he explained, completely finished. He had seen the figures on which advertising agencies based their media buys, and, for next year, we were ranked fourth among the ways to reach the richest and most desirable readers. Most agencies would bother to use only the top two on the list, and, without ad money, the paper would die. That’s why we had raised the price, he said, and that could only make our situation worse.
I’m not sure whether we believed him, however much journalists love bad news. It was hard to believe that the paper was kept afloat not by the things that we took pride in — the stories that no one else could do — but by the number of readers with more money than sense. Still, the smug executive was right (and bailed out shortly afterwards). Within a couple of years, the paper had collapsed into the tentacles of David Montgomery, and the present husk online, with its ownership split between Russian and Saudi money, is worse than anything we could possible have imagined.
That has been the fate of any number of once-honoured titles (or brands, as the advertisers think of them). It looks as though nothing counts in the business but the ability to deliver an audience to an advertiser, and social media can do this more cheaply and effectively than traditional media ever could.
FORBES magazine just ran a story on the sudden glut of American-themed Facebook pages running feel-good McNuggets of manly news — all, of course, made up. Sixty-seven of them were based overseas, the largest number in Macedonia. Between them, they had more than nine million followers, which is more than either The Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post have managed on Facebook. Even though they were shut down after this investigation, they’ll be back. The business is too profitable.
That isn’t the whole story. There is a small audience for whom truthful news on specialised subjects really matters, and a still smaller proportion of that audience for whom truthful and occasionally insightful news matters enough to pay for, especially when it is presented entertainingly.
In Britain, and on the news stands, the best example of this is Private Eye, which never went online in any meaningful sense. Although it is mostly read for its jokes, it has covered, and sometimes broken, many scandals before the mainstream press; and, although it clearly makes money from advertisements, it has never been dependent on that income. It has got some stories spectacularly wrong, but that’s showbiz.
Online, there are now newsletters on specialised subjects appearing which can survive on subscription income. I can’t think of any religious examples, but, in economics, technology, and even the wider culture, there are more and more of these appearing on places such as Substack. They represent only a tiny fraction compared with the free stuff — but, back before the internet, the journalism that got paid for represented only a minute fraction of the opinions that people would like to have had broadcast . . . and was all the better for it, as a glance at social media will prove.
MEANWHILE, it gets harder and harder to read newspaper sites on the internet for free. The Times has even started charging extra for people who don’t want to see “personalised” advertisements. I would pay to avoid them if I did not have an effective adblocker on my phone, since they are the ones that most effectively distract me.
If I add together all of the magazine subscriptions, the substacks, and the newspaper subs, I am paying more, even in real terms, than I was 20 years ago. It would be nice to believe that I am getting a better quality of journalism as a result.