Newspapers: the End has ended, when will the Beginning begin?
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Does 20,000 people constitute “a lot of people”? Clearly it’s context dependant. 20,000 is a lot of people in, say, a flashmob for a student production of Anything Goes. It’s a lot fewer at a Champions League final. It’s a lot of people signing our petition to improve Parkinson’s care in the UK; it’s not very many people voting for a party that would actually tackle Britain’s social care crisis. And so on.
It also marks a figure that no regional daily newspaper in Britain passes anymore. ABC figures (opt-in data that tracks media performance in the UK) this week revealed that the Irish News and Press & Journal (an Aberdonian paper) had both sunk below that threshold, joining every other regional daily, from the Liverpool Echo to the Manchester Evening News, below that 20,000 marker. And, of course, 20,000 does not qualify as “a lot of people” when it comes to a newspaper. And while regionals are struggling to scrape together this relatively puny audience, their national cousins are faring hardly any better. ABC figures this week revealed that no national newspaper had increased its year-on-year growth. Everyone is in managed decline, whether that’s small (Metro, a free paper, was only down 0.2%) or large (the Mirror was down 16.4%). Worst affected were the weekend papers: Sunday Mirror -17.3%, Sunday Post -17.3%, Sunday Express -16.8%, Sunday People -20.7%, and Sunday Mail -20.4%. The day of rest, it seems, does not involve reclining with a newspaper. (Several major newspapers — The Times, Telegraph, and the Sun — stopped submitting data to ABC in 2020. The Guardian and Observer stopped in 2021. You may interpret that as a show of strength or weakness, as you wish.)
If this were a movie, the doctor would be pounding the chest of the patient with a defibrillator while a nurse called to him — her patient voice betraying a hint of fear — to “call it”. The patient is no longer responsive, it’s over. “Call it, doctor.”
I think it’s safe to say that the print newspaper is dead, not just here in the UK but internationally as well. That’s been a pretty safe thing to say for a decade. The doctor keeps pumping the paddles against the patients chest, but the time of death has been recorded. Newspapers have been impressive in their willingness to limp on beyond a terminal diagnosis, but the period that might be called the End seems now to have ended. A more pressing concern, therefore, is what comes next. Because nothing as vast and culturally significant as the newspaper industry ends (Ends, The End, RIP) and isn’t replaced by something. And at the moment all we have are pretenders — and, more importantly, pretenders who seem to miss the point of a newspaper.
Earlier this year, I took out a print subscription to a 6-day-a-week newspaper. I had, for some time, been a devotee of its weekend edition, which comes out on a Saturday morning, and which I’d always buy on the way to playing my low-quality, over-30s, 7-a-side football game at 9am. I saw the price ticking up and noted, a year or so ago, the first time the woman at W.H. Smith charged me more than £5. “Awful lot for a newspaper,” she remarked, and I felt compelled to defend it. After all, the amount of work that goes into the vast spread of news, opinion and supplements in a weekend paper should be worth a fiver, especially in a world where a latte now routinely costs £4. But I just smiled, tapped my phone against the card reader, and went off to my ritual sporting humiliation.
£5.10 x 52 equals £265.20. And yet, for just under £200, I got the same paper (including its Weekend edition) 6 days a week, delivered to my door before 7am. This is a great deal but also a sign that the industry is profoundly broken. Sure, it’s an introductory offer, designed to get me hooked — but a year-long introductory offer is hella generous. Who knows where that publisher will be in a year? Can they really afford to subsidise me for 12 months while I built the habit?
At a party recently I mentioned this subscription to the editor of a national magazine. I started the day now, I said, with a newspaper. He just scoffed. “But how much of each paper would you actually read? Just a couple of pages?” he asked. “Sure,” I replied. “Sometimes nothing at all. But it’s there, and it’s hardly costing me anything.” But, again, he seemed unimpressed, both by the deal and by the possible necessity of a morning newspaper. Is there any point buying a newspaper if you only read a couple of pages of it?
Yes.
The power of journalism — of the journalist — used to be an ability to decide what people read about. You chose what to write about and chose to put it on the front page of the newspaper. Putting it on the front page of the newspaper meant that people would read it, and if they read about it they would care about it. And so the act of journalism — from story selection, reporting and writing, right through to editing, publishing, and sales — dictated what the world was concerned with. This is an awesome level of power, and it was eminently abusable. Think of William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and its campaign to destroy US-Soviet relations in the interwar period; think of Rupert Murdoch’s empire of spin, pushing voters towards the candidates most chummy with the Murdoch family. The temptation to demonise a period where men of suspicious motives set the global agenda is almost irresistible.
And yet what has replaced it? The rise of online and digital journalism has changed not just the mechanism of dissemination, but the diet of news consumers. When cable news emerged in the 1980s, rapidly becoming the dominant force in American political discourse, it proved a remarkable shift in method. The whole timbre of discourse was changed. The power players shifted from greasy ink-stained editors to immaculately-coiffed, perma-tanned walking smiles. Opinion became even more strikingly important. And yet, really, the diet was still being imposed on consumers. In fact, it could be imposed even more precisely — where a newspaper inevitably offered a smorgasbord of potential stories, of which readers might pick a few of interest (“just a couple of pages…”), cable news could tell them exactly what they were supposed to be thinking about. Now — right now — as they watch along in real time. And so, that shift was really just a technological upgrade, a retuning of the antenna.
Online news is entirely different. There are two major sources of traffic to online news publications: social media and Google news. The first relies upon a semi-viral amplification process taking place on networks like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok etc. Users who are scrolling a seemingly endless waterfall of content are grabbed by something — a headline, an image — and they click on the content, taking them off-app and into the clutches of the publication. That’s how I end up reading about Pete Davidson’s new “non-celebrity” (shock!) girlfriend. It’s a totally opt-in process, one where the reader has the whip-hand. It has led to the rise and rise of “clickbait”: headlines and/or images that are designed to tantalise potential readers, to bait them into clicking like a ripe worm wiggling on a hook.
Google news, meanwhile, is a less talked about power player in the modern digital media. It is, essentially, Google’s algorithmic function which privileges certain news stories at the top of the responses when people use certain search terms. So if I search ‘Pete Davidson’ on Google right now, I get a collection of “Top stories” to consider. This is an incredibly powerful position for any publisher to find themselves in (think about how many people Google ‘Taylor Swift’ each day — well, at the moment, they’re presented with links to Cosmopolitan, Elle and the Times of India).
The thrilling contents of Pete Davidson’s Google news responses
Now, there’s clearly an element of clickbait here. “5 Things to Know” makes an appearance, as do references to Pete’s “mystery new girlfriend” (somewhat undermined by her name appearing in all the other pieces). But even if this involves less active seduction, it is still incredibly opt-in. After all, I only find the piece about Pete and Elsie “getting hot and heavy” if I’ve already Googled ‘Pete Davidson’. I am a consumer who wants to find out more about X subject, and Google has become the central tool to help publishers give consumers what they want.
But this is so unlike newspapers and even cable news. Now, publishers are in a position where they prioritise the subjects that they believe their audiences want to read about. “Twas ever thus,” you might say, but now the data corroborates each micro-decision they make. Of course, not every newspaper magnate is Hearst, someone willing to ram his own political opinions down his readers’ throats, but while there was a clear desire to sell elements of the newspaper to their target demographic (never forget the exposed pair of breasts on the third page of The Sun), this wasn’t previously quite such a scientific exercise in market research and audience delivery. Now, publishers will make minute tweaks to a headline about Sabrina Carpenter in order to know whether it’s more important to say she “stuns” or mention her “risqué” outfit. Everything is analysed to death, all in service of getting more users to opt-in to the news.
And so, at a point, it stops becoming news. It starts becoming just a reinforcement of the world as it already is. “Our audience love stories about billionaires buying private islands,” one editor might tell his team of reporters. “So find me a billionaire buying a private island.” The balance of the front page — a liquid thing, subject in many newsrooms to data-driven processes designed to push the best-performing pieces — is compromised.
The advantage of having a print newspaper is being able to escape self-selection and its biases. On the train into town today, I read about a the Norwegian Oil Fund, which has just bought up a quarter of Covent Garden, having previously bought a big stake in Regent Street and a shopping mall in Sheffield. I hadn’t even really considered who owned that sort of major real estate, nor the implications of Norway’s investment in the UK’s retail heartlands. And yet, there’s no chance that I would’ve clicked on that piece on social media, with its unsexy headline or boring picture of a touristy part of London. Nor would I have Googled “Norwegian Oil Fund”, “Norges”, “Covent Garden real estate”, or any of the search terms that would’ve brought up reporting of this story. I would simply never have known, had it not been on the front page of a newspaper that was delivered to my door at 6:08am this morning.
Journalism is more powerful if it doesn’t divest responsibility for story selection back to the reader.
And those powerful agents of traffic in the digital age — social media and Google news — are proving to be fickle allies. Almost overnight, Twitter became X, and X became a site that de-prioritised external linking. From being arguably the most important social media network for journalism, X is now completely eschewed by the mainstream (it is clearly still a profitable place for smaller and solo publishers). Google news, meanwhile, is not something I’d bet on. Google has been in a frenzy developing and integrating AI tools. If I Google “Covent Garden ownership” the first response I get is the AI Overview (collated, in this case, from a combination of The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Times and the Covent Garden Area Trust) and then, halfway down the page, the same information available via the ‘Top Stories’ from CNBC, The London Stock Exchange, The Guardian and The Telegraph. This is but an intermediate step: I have little doubt that soon enough Google news will be erased entirely in favour of an AI response which repackages other people’s reporting as a digestible paragraph.
The end of newspapers is not, in itself, particularly exciting. It’s been a long time coming. But in the decade that the media has had to prepare for this inevitability, the structures and processes built to replace it have undermined core principles that gave the media its power in the first place. And with power comes influence; with influence, money. The modern print media is heading to a place where it is less powerful and less profitable. And still, as the nurses fight to restrain the doctor (tears running down his face as he, finally, throws the paddles to the ground), there is no better showcase for what journalism was and what it can be than the old-fashioned, didactic splendour of a newspaper.
Digital media needs to imitate that. Tell your readers what to read, or you will become a vapid mirror when the world needs a screen.
