What’s next for digital media?
WRITTEN BY BARBARA SPEED ILLUSTRATION BY ALEXANDER SHATOV
Post-Brexit and post-Trump, where does the media go next? In 2016, the EU referendum and presidential elections took place in quick succession, suggesting that on both sides of the Atlantic we were more polarised than ever before.
Yet these two events have, in some ways, been a good thing for media organisations – and ironically enough, the calmer political waters of 2021 could pose something of a threat to the industry.
Faced with a tribal, divided society, outlets in 2016 had two options: to either pander to one side or another or attempt to act as a unifying force. Unsurprisingly, those opting for the former won out. This includes the British tabloids, but also less obvious publications, like the New York Times, whose marketing campaigns over the past four years have used taglines like, ‘The truth is under attack’. The brand sold itself on its opposition to the President (and vice versa) and as a challenge to the ‘fake news’ which blossomed during the 2016 election campaign. In a recent piece for New York Magazine, Reeves Waldman reported that NYT digital subscriptions have soared by over 130 per cent in what is being called a ‘Trump bump’.
“A world without Trump, Brexit, or the pandemic feels like alien territory for publications, most of which have changed hugely since 2016.”
In the UK, the BBC’s charter left it with no option but to try to appeal to both sides. As a result, it has come under near-constant attack – accused of ‘false balance’ for bringing on pro-Brexit guests or climate change deniers. Its supposedly ‘woke’ culture has led new director-general Tim Davie to issue staff guidelines around staying neutral on their social media accounts.
Whatever a publication’s approach, the tumultuous news and the culture wars between left and right have made for easy clicks (if not always sales of print publications). Speaking as a journalist, lots of news, whether good or bad, is helpful: it reminds people of the importance of the media.
On the heels of these political upheavals came the pandemic: a year-long (and counting) news event which moved so quickly that publications were often the only sources of information beyond labyrinthine government websites. As populations gave up their rights and privileges on an unprecedented scale, the media held governments and their daily changes of policy to account. In June 2020, Press Gazette found that ten of the biggest US and UK newspaper groups had already gained a collective 1m digital subscribers during the pandemic, despite the economic impact on households.
A world without Trump, Brexit, or the pandemic feels like alien territory for publications, most of which have changed hugely since 2016. It seems possible that consumers will back away from news completely once they aren’t relying on it to find out if they can leave their homes. But even without this effect, we’re likely to see many publications move away from trying to reach as many people as possible, and towards reaching a smaller audience, albeit one which will pay.
Since 2016, it has become very clear that making a profit from digital advertising or trying to get social media sites to pay up for publications’ content was a pipe dream for all but the largest sites. The kind of traffic required to break even usually means publishing journalism to suit algorithms and advertisers, rather than readers. Meanwhile, those sites which have moved to subscription or donation models have found that the articles which prompt readers to pay are of a very different breed to those that get the most clicks: long reports from foreign countries, for example, or on the environment.
Reuters and the University of Oxford’s media predictions for 2021, based on interviews with senior journalists around the world, has found that the importance of display advertising, native advertising, events, and related businesses have all fallen considerably. What has grown is the importance of subscriptions, with 76 per cent saying this will be important in the coming year. The same proportion also said that the pandemic had sped up their plans for digital transitions.
This focus on digital and subscriptions in tandem suggests a desire to build trust and relationships with readers: in the post-post-truth era, in which experts have been validated and vaccines save the world, readers might see that the digital journalism they pay for is likely to have more worth than something funded by intrusive advertisements and geared mainly towards appearing in Google search results. Meanwhile, the idea of a kind of portfolio business with lots of different arms – giving the journalism away but charging for events or tote bags or wine deals – seems to be receding in favour of simply getting readers to pay for the journalism itself.
The danger, of course, is that without a variety of free news appearing online, we may retreat into ever-smaller filter bubbles, entrenching the cultural and political divisions we have seen since 2016. In the UK, the existence of the BBC mitigates that risk to some extent, but it doesn’t answer the question of how we will encounter a range of angles and opinions in the future: it would take a very big person indeed to pay a publication they detest in order to read what the other half thinks. The counter argument, of course, is that the structure of social media means we don’t encounter those opinions now anyway – but that a subscription-based publication is better able to show us things we may not agree with if it isn’t competing with every other outlet on Twitter.
Hearteningly, as we leave the Trump and Brexit eras behind, 88 per cent of news executives told the study that impartiality is more important than ever, though many said that some subjects – like democracy or racism – do not warrant a neutral position. (I have to admit a vested interest in impartiality here – the publication I work for has no political affiliation.)
Morality and politics aside, we seem to have reached a major turning point for the media: many outlets have concluded that the business model for online news isn’t working. How publishers choose to confront that in a new political landscape will be fascinating to watch.
Barbara Speed
Barbara Speed is the Opinion editor at the i newspaper. She has written extensively on technology and digital culture for the New Statesman, Prospect, and other publications, and is the co-author of The Power of Journalists (Haus Publishing).