No we don't need state-funded journalists, we need content people want to buy

Local newspapers are dying. This death is accompanied by a great wailing from the usual sources who argue (without really explaining why) that local papers - even ones that are hardly read at all by the public, even on-line - are "vital to a functioning democracy". The government last year set on Dame Frances Caincross, a left-wing journalist, to look at what could be done to rescue local papers from their impending doom.

Unsurprisingly our journalist concludes that the only solution is state-funded journalism, a new regulator (staffed by worthy lefties like Dame Frances no doubt) and assorted enquiries into the evil that is Facebook (and other monstrous tech giants like Google). It is also unsurprising that, aside from one chap from the Advertising Association, the entire panel of 'experts' advising Dame Frances were journalists or media owners. The outcome of the commission is entirely predictable and won't serve, in any way, to rescue the local press.

The problem is that, despite working in businesses that depend to a greater or lesser extent on advertising, journalists seem not to have the slightest clue as to why advertisers invest their cash in the manner they do. Here's one pretty typical example from Twitter:

I think most journalists know that. They’re at the mercy of hapless publishing giants and similarly incompetent media buying agencies who are so obsessed by Facebook et al that they’ve stopped investing in what’s important.

As you can see journalism ("quality journalism" is the official management term here) is dying because those naive advertisers have been duped by Facebook and Google into shifting their spending there rather than leaving it with publications that nobody reads. Now it's true that marketers, for brand advertising at least, are pulling back from relying on Facebook and Google, but they are not shifting their spend back into print newspapers (magazines are a different matters - take note that the top four TV listings magazines sell nearly 4 million copies every week).

The reason brands are pulling away from social media is that the owners of that media are limiting the advertising's reach by manipulating the algorithms - where once millions of likes meant millions in reach, it now means thousands. Plus, with consumers shifting their attention to other social media, the responsiveness of Facebook advertising degrades - even with supposedly sophisticated targeting Facebook is using a heavy roller to crack walnuts.

There is an old joke about newspapers that the purpose of the journalism is to fill in the gaps between the advertising. We shouldn't forget that most local papers exist because they provided a vehicle for local businesses to advertise. Yes those newspapers did journalism but much of the point for the journalism was to get folk to buy the paper. I recall being told by one former local paper editor about his first assignment as a junior reporter - go to a funeral with the instruction to write down the name of as many people attending as possible. Local papers carried photographs with lots of people in because those people - and their nearest and dearest - would buy the paper.

The stock in trade of local newspapers wasn't "quality journalism", it was births, deaths and marriages, cars for sales, cinema listings, job adverts, sports results, school prize givings and evening classes. The sale adverts from the local department store were just as important (probably more so) than the report of what Alderman Smith had said about the parks department at Wednesday's Council meeting. The paper was a record of the boring mundanities of life in a community - Bradford's Telegraph & Argus has been sharing online some images from the past: football teams, ballet classes, scout troops and girl guides not councillors or MPs.

People still want all these lists, this record of everyday life, it's just that so much of it has moved elsewhere - not to Facebook (although a glimpse through community pages will show that they absolutely capture those everyday events and happenings) but to job sites and car sales sites, to direct messaging and to email. If local papers want to do their "quality journalism" maybe they need to think about how to get back the bread and butter of past times rather than try to blame social media for a demise that was predictable in the 1990s at the outset of the 'world wide web' - long before Facebook or Google came to dominate the world.

It is crazy to see the solution as some sort of state-funded cadre of local journalists producing copy that nobody reads because someone has decided that it is "quality journalism". Instead news media need to turn off the button marked "free" (and it would help here if the BBC didn't crowd out so much on-line, something Cairncross does note) and start expecting the public to pay for news. Most of them won't because they're not really that interested but if the cost is low enough there's no reason why local media cannot work. What we can't have, however, is journalists believing they've some sort of privileged position in society (all the guff about democracy and so forth) and expecting taxes to provide for them.

Oh, and next time we have an enquiry into an area where advertising is central perhaps we should put marketers in charge? What Dame Frances and her advisors have shown us is that they - mostly journalists - really haven't the faintest idea why advertisers make the spending decision they make. And I hope such a panel would conclude that we don't need state-funded journalists, we need content people want to buy.

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Fake news, filter bubbles and the failure of the BBC

A couple of days ago The Times splashed its front page with a story about a leaked 'Cabinet Office Memo'. You all saw the story, either in its original Times incarnation or else the retread from The Guardian, The Telegraph, Sky News or the BBC. The content of the memo and the argument it informs is not relevent to what I'm going to say but rather the provenance of the memo. The argument is merely the victim of the news story.

Within a few hours of The Times splashing its story, there were doubts about its veracity. Was there really a government memo or has there been some sort of creative interpretation of something else. The government helpfully told us there was no such memo but then whoever believes anything a government tells us?

In the end the story was shown as a more-or-less complete fiction. Rather than a memo produced by a government department to advise the Cabinet, we had instead a polemic created on the authors' initiative as a pitch for consultancy business. The 'truth' presented in that Times story turned out to be quite a lot less than actual truth. Fleetingly one wonders how a great newspaper can make such a cock-up even to the point of asking whether it's not a cock-up but essentially a commissioned leak designed to embarrass the government - a sort of Brexit version of the Zinoviev letter?

Oddly - or maybe not oddly at all - alongside this example of misleading news reporting there has been a story about how 'fake news' was responsible (I exaggerate but only slightly) for Donald Trump winning the US Presidential election:

In particular, there are those who argue that Facebook fueled Trump’s rise by circulating a host of fake news stories about political topics, and these stories helped tip the scale in his favor.

Coupled with the filtering algorithm used by Facebook all this fake news resulted in a 'post-truth' election result. Others, including Facebook itself, have kicked back at this argument by pointing out that most (like 99%) of the content on Facebook isn't fake news. What's odd - to me at least - is that very few people have pointed out that Facebook isn't a newspaper, it's content is user-generated, unmoderated, unedited and therefore essentially untrustworthy. But bluntly the problem isn't fake news on Facebook it's the selective presentation of news, even false news, by trustworthy media.

And this problem - what I might call the "mainstream media filter" if that didn't sound too much like the wilder fringes of left and right wing blogging - is why here in the UK, we were all so utterly shocked and surprised at Donald Trump's election. Every news story on every channel told us that there was absolutely no chance at all of Donald Trump winning. When I went to the excellent Bradford Politics in the Pub everyone, panel and audience, believed that Donald trump was toast.

Why is this? Partly it's about the failure of opinion polling - US polling has hit the same wall as polls in the UK, but I don't think this explains all that failure. It's easy for us to lean back, smile and say. "I know I was wrong but so was everyone else - look at the polls". You'd have thought that, after the 2015 election and the EU referendum, us Brits would have developed a healthy scepticism about predictions based on opinion polling?

No, the reason for us getting it so comprehensively wrong (and looking at the US popular vote, those national polls weren't so wrong any way) is that the media we trust - BBC and other broadcasters, broadsheets newspapers - created a narrative that failed entirely to reflect the actual debate in the US election. We got an easy-to-swallow caricature of Donald Trump - racist, sexist, homophobic, bonkers - set against an equally shallow picture of Hillary Clinton. The election was light and dark, good and evil, saint versus sinner - there was no way Americans would vote for a man as bad as Trump especially as it would mean we wouldn't have the first female US president.

Watching events before and after the election - especially on the BBC - we can see the shift from smug certainty to incredulity and incomprehension. The BBC's narrative - indeed the narrative of almost the entire UK press corps - collapsed under the shallowness of its analysis, the prejudice of its presumptions and the degree of its ignorance about the USA and its demographics. It's not just that some of the anti-Trump stuff might just be crying wolf but that we'd not spotted that a whole lot of people in the USA actually looked at Trump's agenda and concluded they'd have a go with that.

After all, Trump's message out there was about jobs, immigration, patriotism, ending corruption and giving a voice to the voiceless. It's true this is a deceptive agenda - the economic policies will make America poorer not greater and in a land of immigrants attacking immigration seems dumb and just a bit racist - but when the counter is shrill attacks on the candidate's character rather than a debate about the issues, should we be so surprised when a whole bunch of people gave Hillary the proverbial finger?

So when the BBC and others point at Facebook, accusing the social medium of spreading fake news and creating filter bubbles, perhaps they need to examine the massive beam in their own eye - after all Facebook doesn't pretend to be a news medium, the BBC does. And, if we've learned anything over the last two years it's that the voting behaviour (and, I don't doubt, the opinions and attitudes) of a lot of folk simply doesn't fit the liberal* narrative that our national media promotes. Whether there's anything that can be (or indeed should be) done is a matter for debate but one thing is certain, the search for different news sources on-line suggests that a lot of people out there have rejected that liberal world view and are seeking alternative news sources.

The growth of fake news - as well as polemical sites like Vox or Breitbart and conspiracy sites like Infowars or the UK's own Canary - reflects the utter failure of the main news organisations and, in the UK, especially the BBC. I watched an interview by a BBC reporter of a man from 'Gays for Trump' (this might not have been the exact name of the group but it describes it precisely). The reporter may have been tired - it was the morning after Trump's election - but what came across was utter contempt for the young man being interviewed: how dare he challenge the narrative of trump as gay-hating (he isn't) and appear as a pleasant, personable bloke rather than the cartoon version of the Trump supporter as a one-toothed, baseball-capped, wall-eyed, racist redneck!

Next year, we have elections in France. They're pretty important, not least because Marine Le Pen leads in the polls and the BBC and others will be building themselves up into a funk at the possibility of her election. What we might hope for is a slightly better narrative from the BBC and other national media, one that actually reflects the debate rather than "oh my god, no, please, not Le Pen, not a fascist, fascists are bad" repeated over and over again. It may be true that the French run-off system makes it very difficult for Le Pen to win (we saw this in Austria where they very nearly elected an old Green communist in preference to the Freedom Party candidate for president) but we deserve something of a better analysis that we've had in the last three campaigns the BBC has covered.

The selective nature of BBC news-making, the prejudice of mainstream sources and the inability of London-based reporters to appreciate a fundamental cultural difference between city and country, capital and provinces - these things have created a filter bubble around the BBC, other broadcasters and the main broadsheet newspapers that is far more damaging than 'fake news' sites on Facebook. Just as social science academia needs to actively recruit conservatives, so do the main media outlets, newspapers and broadcasters - not as superstar columnists or presenters but in the bones of the organisation as programme planners, producers, directors and researchers.

Right now a growing part of the population - radicalised by Brexit (to use the sort of divisive language the BBC valorises) - is more and more distrustful of our national news media and especially the one they pay for, the BBC. We know The Guardian and its ilk are biased but we now know that this increasingly applies to the BBC - the liberal media filter bubble just means that people at the BBC haven't recognised just how they're no longer meeting the public service remit given them in their charter. The incomprehension we saw in May 2015 became wilder in June 2016 and frantic in November 2016 - the UK's national media didn't see any of this coming because it was looking in the wrong places. Mostly its own navel. This is the problem not fake news stories on Facebook.

*Please note that where used the word 'liberal' is meant in its perjorative American meaning not its sane, noble and decent English meaning
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(Dis)owning the news...

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There was a time when I bought two newspapers every day. In the morning I'd buy the Daily Telegraph in the shop over the road, walk to Kent House station and complete the crossword on the journey to London Bridge (the aim was to get it done before reaching Herne Hill but this seldom happened). On the way home I'd buy the London Evening News and do its three crosswords - the worst of these was the so-called children's crossword.

I write this because, back then, other than the evening news on the TV, that was the sum total of our news consumption. Almost everyone bought one or other of the national papers and in doing so maintained a huge industry of paper boys, paper stalls, newsagents, journalists, advertising executives and sales people. Not to ignore the legendary - or should I say notorious - printers with their closed shops and 'spanish practices'. Living in South London I knew a few printers - my friend in the YCs, Ian was from a whole family of Fleet Street printers (Tory voters every one). They all had private print shops and, when they needed some extra cash, would do a shift or two on the Sundays - whether this actually entailed any work was something I never fully discovered.

Newspapers were big business and they were important. Ownership mattered and those papers could and did set the national agenda, influence the outcome of political debates and make a difference to the way people voted. And the legacy of all this remains - the media is still slightly obsessed with the ups and downs of the newspapers especially that part of the media not owned by Rupert Murdoch or Lord Rothermere.

The most recent manifestation of this obsession is the idea that we can crowdsource the funds to buy one or two of the national titles off Rupert Murdoch:

Hardly surprising, then, to see the groundswell of support for a new campaign, “Let’s Own the News” which launched this week and is inviting pledges from people who like the idea of buying The Times and The Sunday Times from Rupert Murdoch.  Backed by The Young Foundation, Let’s Own the News say that “80% of the national newspapers we read are controlled by 5 families, this is not a free press and it undermines our democracy. Our vote is worth little if a few people control the information we read. ”

So far the campaign has raised a little over £250,000 which probably isn't enough to buy the two titles right now. However,  setting aside the vanity of this project, the truth about news - or rather newspapers - is that ownership is of little relevance. We the people have, in the main, disowned newspapers.

Back in the 1970s sales for daily newspapers were around 16m and for Sunday newspapers around 20m - this is more-or-less one per household (there were about 19m households in the UK in 1975). By way on contrast, in 2000, there were 25m households and sales for daily and Sunday papers stand at around 10m apiece. This suggests that at least half - and probably more - of households did not buy a newspaper at all. This trend continues.

A hard business look at the Times and Sunday Times might suggest that these titles simply aren't viable (or likely to be viable). It makes sense for a large conglomerate to own them - they provide gravitas, have a brand that can be used elsewhere and provide an influential platform for opinion. On their own - without the protection of News Corp or a deep pocketed private trust such as the Guardian's owner - the prospects for creating a sustainable and profitable newspaper business is, to put it mildly, pretty slim.

But that's the business of the folk trying to buy the newspaper. What bugs me slightly is their argument that the change is needed to reduce the concentrated control of the news and hence the news agenda. The argument that the newspapers are owned by only 5 families completely misses the point. The real problem isn't with newspapers but with the organisation that controls nearly 40% of media output in the UK and which has a wholly disproportionate influence over the news agenda.

Changing the ownership of the Times wouldn't make a jot of difference - fewer than a million folk buy the papers and, since they disappeared behind a paywall, they don't get the millions of online visits that the Telegraph, Mail and Guardian enjoy. But reforming the BBC would make a difference. Our news consumption is via the TV, computer and mobile phone and it is here that the change must come. Put simply the case for having a state broadcaster that dominates UK online news and is funded via a poll tax is now almost impossible to justify. Rather than trying (and probably failing) to raise £100m to buy the times, the Young Foundation would serve the cause of a more open news economy much better by campaigning to scrap the licence fee.

As consumers we have disowned newspapers, they are increasingly marginal and it is hard to see a future for them in their traditional role or format. The future of news creation and distribution is online and mobile and right now the BBC is making it hard for choice and independence to succeed in this new news market. If we want to reduce the concentration of media power then the place to start is with the BBC not the Times.

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Quote of the day...on the nature of modern political reporting

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Chris Dillow stumbles onto a precise description of modern political reporting:

A lot of political reporting consists either of trivial Kremlinology - a description of a soap opera in which most "characters" are interchangeable one-dimensional cyphers - or of an unquestioning imposition of an ideology which fetishizes "strong leadership." 

Combine this with news shows - Question Time, Newsnight, The Politics Show - that are essentially entertainment rather than information and you have the essence of why we are all so ignorant of politics and so dismissive of its practitioners.

I cannot recall the last time I learnt anything (other than a reaffirmation of modern interveiwers' incorrigible rudeness) from these programmes. And they almost never contain any actual "news".

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Is anyone paying attention....

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Over the years I've remarked often that most people, most of the time, simply aren't remotely interested in politics. More to the point those people not only aren't interested, they aren't paying attention. Yes we can grab their attention by putting a big headline in front of their eyes - to which they'll respond with an "oh yes, terrible" sort of remark and then return to chatting about the football or the latest celebrity divorce. Or more likely, what their children are doing at school and the latest gossip about colleagues at work.

It may pain us political types but all that effort to 'dominate the media narrative' or other such tommy-rot of the spinners world is just that, tommy-rot. People aren't paying attention. Here's Populus' weekly poll that asks people what stories they've noticed:

Only the NHS story among these is relevant to UK politics and just 8% 'noticed'. People really aren't paying attention to the news (even where they're watching the news programmes, I suspect this flitters through people's lives like background noise).

Now some of the politically-obsessed will now be heard muttering about 'apathy' and 'engagement', even 'participation'. These anoraks miss the point - the point is that wealth and comfort makes politics less and less relevant to people. And this is a good thing, it represents a little more withering away of government - another step towards us not actually needing government at all.

Now I appreciate that, right now, we have the most intrusive government since we decided that the king wasn't a god and didn't own all the stuff as of right. But this covers over the fact that most people's connection with government comes through one or all of health, education, welfare or having the bin emptied. And so long as they're not actively annoyed or upset by one of these, they have few problems with government.

The shift here is from government being something that is actively done to us to us being consumers of government. It really doesn't matter whether we pay directly or through taxes, we perceive ourselves as customers rather than subjects. And the debate around politics is about us exercising our consumption role rather than choosing someone to "run the country". Elections are the point at which we can choose different strategies for managing those services - it may not be the best way to do this but it's the way, for now, we've chosen. So when the Conservatives were rambling on about financial sovereignty and other such grand matters, Tony Blair talked about 'schools and hospitals' and won the election.

For me the importance of this change from subject to customer is that it suggests that government is not necessary - at least not on its current scale - to the delivery of what we currently (and wrongly) see as 'public goods'. There is a reducing need for us to provide, for example, healthcare or education through the medium of government, it is a choice that we make because it seems to us better, fairer or more effective.

The big winners in this sort of politics are those who - as Blair did - focus on what, when I was a student activist, called "soft loo-paper politics". Rather than endeavouring to change the world (or even Hull University) the successful political leader focuses on getting better services - health, education, filling in potholes. And the politician - the MP or councillor - bends his efforts to dealing with these issues, to be someone who badgers away at the minutiae of constituency problems. The old sort of MP - a grand fella who lives grandly in London and descends on the constituency for the AGM, the annual dinner and a couple of (reluctant) weeks at election time - no longer fits the bill however valuable the contribution of those men might have been.

A good few years ago I wrote in praise of 'idiots'  - those people who didn't engage, weren't involved and only (at best) reluctantly turned out to cast a vote in elections:

Round here they’re probably in their thirties or forties, employed at a middle management level in business and industry. They worry about how well their kids do at school, they concern themselves with making their family safe, they grumble a bit about paying taxes but have enough cash afterwards for it not to really matter. Such folk are ordinary, hard-working and inherently conservative. But they also see little or no link between the act of voting in a politician from one party or another and the significant things in their lives.

Or to put it another way, these people aren't paying attention. And isn't that wonderful, cheering and independent!

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A good thought...

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Imagine a news service that NEVER employed the words ‘might’, ‘could be’, ‘it is feared that’, ‘campaigners claim that’; would you really mind paying 40p a day for such a reliable trustworthy service? Boring, for sure. Way down in the ratings – and why should it even appear in the ratings? But a ‘verified Wikipedia’, a place where you could be sure that what you read had actually occurred, and here were the facts.

What? A real news service? From the BBC? Won't happen.

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Leveson mission creep - a warning to voluntary organisations

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Folk like me (I think but am not quite sure) are not caught in the mission creep that is the proposed Royal Charter to control the press - at least as solo bloggers. But if - like I do - you are involved in managing a site that publishes news, blogs, events information and other stories, then take note of this:

The result is that they apply to any size of web publisher – if there’s more than one author, the content is edited and there’s a business involved, then you must join a self regulator.

And don't think that you can hide behind being a charity. Remember also that the proposals are for strict liability.

The Open Rights Group have set up a link for you to raise your concerns with Party leaders and your MP. You should - however much you welcome the broad Leveson principles - consider carefully whether the proposed Charter will encompass your organisation and whether you think that is right.

Update: Lord Lucas is sponsoring an amendment that will exclude smaller organisations and individuals from the proposed regulations:

Insert into New Schedule 5 of the Crime and Courts Bill ‘Exclusions from definition of “relevant publisher”
9) “A publisher who does not exceed the definition of a small or medium-sized enterprise as defined in Section 382 and 465 Companies Act 2006.”

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Free press?

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I caught a few moments of the ever crazier arguments promoted for regulating - they call it "statutory underpinning", which sounds like a 19th century dressmakers regulation - the press.

Of course, once you regulate the press you get:

1. A press that isn't free and where politicians and their pals can keep their bad deeds away from the public
2. A slippery slope - each year there'll be calls for changes, a little more control (mostly "for the children" I don't doubt)
3. A supine, spineless, risk-averse media - imagine if it were all like the BBC?

This is why we shouldn't listen to a floppy-haired actor and some bloke who likes his bottom spanked. And why we shouldn't play silly political games with fundamental rights - like free speech.

Unless, of course, you're the Labour Party!

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Can we have more BBC strikes please?

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I understand that the BBC's journalists went on strike today.

And there was a refreshing change to my morning listening. Normally the news is interrupted by Nicky Campbell's writhing, self-indulgent metroliberalism or overly aggressive interviews by Humphries.

This morning we got none of that - just news and interviews presented pleasantly and professionally. I felt informed and my annoyance was limited to the content of the news not the outlook of the news presenter.

Perhaps more strikes might continue to raise standards!

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More on the death of journalism

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With our breath bated we waited, What could it be? What terrible act would bring down the minister - departmental failure, corruption or...what's this? Ah, Twitter!

The newspaper that likes to think of itself as that little bit more right-on than all the others has chosen as its lead story - emblazoned across its front page - a sad little tale about Twitter:

An anonymous Twitter account called @toryeducation* is regularly used to attack critical stories about both Gove and his department. It is often abreast of imminent Tory policies, suggesting it is coming from close to the centre of government. However, it is also used to rubbish journalists and Labour politicians while promoting Gove's policies and career. 

There was a time when newspapers reported news, when journalists wrote about wars, dug into real scandal and investigated actual corruption.  For sure there was plenty of gossip and, to serve the market for this stuff, the newspaper would have a diary column tucked away somewhere in its bowels. Now, it seems, stories that merit a couple of lines in that diary now run on the front page.

We are, I fear, watching the death throes of journalism. It is being killed by two things - firstly the economics of publishing newspapers means that real story-finding is too expensive and secondly, political journalists now see themselves as players rather than observers and reporters. Newspapers are filled with a mix of rewarmed press releases and tittle-tattle. The comments of other journalists are reported creating a  purposeless and news-free circus.

Is it any wonder that each year fewer people bother to buy newspapers when they don't report on the real world  but on the land of pine-scrubbed kitchen table make-believe that these London-based "journalists" occupy. While there are wars, terrorist attacks, banking crises and much else besides, The Observer deems that a snarky little Twitter spat is more important.

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Has the BBC given up on reporting news??

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Yesterday evening, the main BBC News chose to spend the first ten minutes of a half-hour programme talking about racism at the European Football Championships. Now I happen to think that racism is a serious issue but still question whether a few idiot Poles making monkey noises at non-white Dutch footballers really constitutes the main news item.

Once the BBC had finished with interviewing itself and expressing shock and horror at the racist chants, the next important news item was that we had some pretty bad weather. This featured some pretty spectacular waves (not the surfing kind) at a place in Cornwall.

Only then did the BBC mention the appalling events in Syria where a government is beating, raping and murdering its citizens while giving the finger to the civilized world. The imminent collapse of the Euro (perhaps) barely merits a mention. Before we return again to sport, to racism and the preening of presenters.

Where is the real news?

It seems to me - and the Leveson enquiry defines this perfectly - that the media classes determine the news agenda by what they talk about at the dinner table or over fancy coffee in some trendy cafe. What matters to real folk out there is the real world is as nothing besides the endless obsession with political gossip, perceptions of racism and having a good laugh at the stupid people who don't live in North London.

All this is compounded by filling in hours of supposed news programming with stagey interviews of BBC journalists - turning these people from news reporters into the news itself. The result is that we are given the tiniest glimpse of the wider world followed by tendentious opinionating from the BBC-appointed (and employed) expert.

It seems to me that the BBC has given up on reporting news.

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The slow death of newspapers...

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This morning, stood on the platform at Green Park tube station, my wife and I happened to chat about the state of the newspaper business - like you do! I commented that it wasn't as simple as saying that the web would kill newspapers - the real killer would be the smart phone.

So no surprise the read this:

Pew research has a new survey showing that tablets and smart phones are now 27% of Americans' primary news source. The overwhelming share of this is phones, not tablets; and a reasonable view says this will rise to 50% in three years.

Why on earth should I pay over good money to buy a newspaper to read on the train when I can get up to the minute news from the BBC or whoever on my phone? Now I may have a problem with the BBC exceeded its remit by pushing aside commercial news production on-line but there's no doubt that mobile technology and TV/web convergance will completely transform the way in which we consume information, entertainment and spend our money.

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