Great journalism costs money. Or at least it used to. The new media kids on the block have been struggling to make ends meet and make commercial sense of the great journalism they're producing. Buzzfeed recently laid off 15 percent of its workforce across the globe, Vice cut more than 10 percent and media giants Verizon, who owns the Huffington Post among others, dropped 800 workers in its media division. Ouch.
These new media houses do stunning investigative work, and many would do well to see beyond the ’15 amazing things about cats’ style articles they once may have been known for. They know their audience and speak to them in myriad ways on easy-access platforms. It gets eyeballs, however, as they’ve been finding out, that’s only half the job done.
Their financial models clearly aren’t bombproof just yet. And it’s a problem as old as news being made available online. Some regional news sites appear to delight in making reading an article like an obstacle course. Get through the survey, then somehow find your way round a full screen assault from the latest Avengers remake trailer before the slow dropdown of a local funeral directors falls onto your screen. Only then can you read the piece you wanted to read. It’s tiring work.
Others were mocked from the outset for putting their news behind some financial paywalls. The Sun famously backtracked on that, but its higher brow stablemates at The Times held its nerve and now its paying dividends as the rest have started to follow suit. The FT is another who has always had some form of paid access online and the Telegraph is putting more and more of its journalistic output behind subscription or paywalls. And its working.
The Guardian too is also reporting transformational commercial success since it introduced requests at the bottom of each online article three years ago for the reader to make donations to great journalism. Latest reports there suggest well in excess of a million donations, with half of those making regular contributions.
It’s no surprise to see many of these titles are traditionally embedded in quality journalism. Tabloid fodder and the latest Love Island gossip is not their market. Niche interest and quality writing remains something, it seems, people are willing to pay for.
These traditional media outlets are also trying to wean themselves off the reliance of social media, in particular Facebook. Their outputs garner massive followings, however, Facebook is seen by many in the media as the enemy, and with no little justification.
Our own founder at W, Warren Johnson very recently suggested that the likes of Facebook and Twitter aren’t social platforms at all, but are indeed publishers, need to be held to account as such and face far more stringent regulation on what it (and therefore we) publish on there. The relative ease and lack of parameters they’re afforded, he said, likened them to a ‘smilier version of the NRA.’ Tough words, but it resonates. Who’s going to be brave enough to stand up to them? Has Facebook simply become too powerful? It’s a dangerous precedent they’ve set.
As we struggle more and more to work our way through what the truth is, what’s propaganda and what’s outright lies, we revert more and more to those sources we trust most. And that’s the media titles our generation grew up with. Consumed differently, for sure, but there’s no doubting the impact media titles, some of whom have been around for hundreds of years, has.
However, there remains a generation that begrudges paying for news. They’ve been raised on free access and being able to gather information for free. And this is going to cause problems with the ageing fanbase of some of those historic titles.
The answer? Well, if I could find a way of fixing this issue, I’d finally be a couple of quid ahead of you lot. I promise it won’t involve surveys about your last trip to Spain though.
Christian Cerisola is head of W North, part of W Communications www.wnorth.co.uk @WCommNorth
