It doesn’t seem that long ago that emergency relief funds were used to help people crushed by natural disasters; now the world’s biggest search engine has launched one to save journalism.
So dire has been the impact of Covid-19 on the news industry that Google announced plans to pay up to the “low tens of thousands” to newsrooms around the UK. Given the scale of the crisis, which comes after years in which Google itself has been the cause of so much disruption, this is like throwing a few planks of wood to those in the middle of a tsunami.
In the past week alone national newspapers including the Telegraph, the Financial Times and the Guardian have furloughed staff and announced further cost cuts after warning of a sharp drop in revenue. Enders Analysis, which forecasts a 50% fall in advertising revenues this year, estimates the total potential cost to the industry at about £650m once circulation declines are included. This is despite record levels of traffic and engagement from online readers. The Guardian’s digital revenues also outstrip those from print. Imagine the impact on smaller newspapers starved of either investment or understanding owners.
Fears over the future of news in a digital ecosystem, in which fakery and clickbait thrives, are nothing new; but this crisis has put matters into sharp relief. A virus could deliver the final blow to parts of an industry already struggling with a failed market.
Unless action is swift, the post-Covid media landscape will be a bleak place in which valuable journalism gets lost in a maelstrom of misinformation. One where an “infodemic” of anything goes online becomes the eventual norm.
A Conservative government that has already nationalised railways and declared journalists to be key workers during this crisis looks set to step in. Last Thursday media minister John Whittingdale met industry figures to discuss the way forward.
If journalism is to be saved as an essential public good a lot more needs to be done – not just by government with public money, but by the technology companies that have benefited from a disfunctional market and by the newspaper industry itself, too.
For a start, the news industry must prove why a legacy in print media justifies any kind of special treatment: it can do so by providing the kind of news and information a democracy deserves and requires. We may all dislike different newspapers, and indeed columnists, but the journalism that makes a real difference – from the Windrush scandal to the murder of Stephen Lawrence to MPs’ expenses – costs money, but in the current system dominated by global tech giants, the market is failing to support it.
There will be a long and no doubt bitter debate about what constitutes good journalism. The industry has a code of conduct, but for too long it hasn’t been properly adhered to. In the post-Covid world, when the news business needs to prove its credentials, that should no longer be the case.
Google, Facebook, Apple and Twitter share much responsibility for the mess we’re in – their executives have spent years dismissing news journalism as this era’s fax machine, while pocketing large amounts of money from the content it provides. Digital newsroom initiatives and paid-for research do nothing more than put a shiny gloss on that fact.
On Friday the NUJ launched its own news recovery plan which suggested a windfall tax of 6% on digital firms. This is a good idea but as one-off it isn’t clear how it could work over the long term. At least Facebook and Google have taken steps in recent weeks to support newspapers in this time of crisis, while Apple has not. The latter continues to take a 30% cut on all new digital news subscriptions through its iOS apps – the same goes with any one-off payments. Apple could at least suspend these payments for the time being.
The very idea of state intervention – last mooted in February 2019 by the Cairncross Review into newspapers – is likely to cause outrage among both those in the industry who see it as an attack on the fourth estate, and those who don’t believe journalism deserves public funding.
Neither major newspaper groups nor the government supported calls in the Cairncross review for a public institute for news. I spoke to Frances Cairncross, who led the report, to talk about the current crisis. “The pressures are so imminent and so powerful that there is a danger that much that is good and would otherwise have survived, will be destroyed,” she says.
There are immediate things which could be done and are likely to win support from both an industry opposed to all state intervention – and a Thatcherite such as Whittingdale. For a start, the government could use public money to pay for local advertising, not just for its own messages but to support local industries currently closed by the lockdown. Denmark, like many Nordic countries, has a history of state support for journalism more or less replacing newspaper advertising with public money this year. Bringing forward VAT tax reliefs announced in the budget and allowing newspapers to claim business rates relief, even though they must keep operating, are other possible measures.
These are small beer compared with the sort of public funding first recommended by Cairncross and backed by the NUJ. It is surely time to at least consider longer-term support.
The big questions are where this money comes from and what kind of journalism it will support. Using public money to support journalism which has long been diminished by greedy owners will be as bad as allowing online platforms to rip up the basic compact of news.
The shareholder model of news ownership failed long before innovative digital platforms showed up its inefficiencies. No more can local newspaper groups, such as Johnson Press and others, asset strip news organisations to achieve 30% profit margins which are then spent on dividends and executive suites rather than newsrooms. The NUJ calls for public money to be withheld from firms using it to sack people, cut pay or block union recognition all while handing out fat bonuses – that seems entirely reasonable.
The NUJ’s windfall tax on digital groups is also a good idea but will it be sustainable? Surely an ongoing rearrangement of the way content is paid for online via licensing agreements would be better.
Faced with historic demands on the public purse it will be true to form if the current government looks to the BBC to help out. This would be a mistake and could prove unpopular. Having delayed payments from the over-75s and stepped up its public service offering with education and more during the pandemic, the BBC faces a cash-strapped future of its own. It would be a travesty if it’s now forced to help local news even more, having stumped up millions for the Local Democracy Reporting Service already.
The post-Covid world is likely to see less money for everyone, of course, with the exception of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. We will all need to work out what needs supporting with limited resources. Even discussing state support for journalism shows how far the news business has fallen. But if we accept that journalism is vital to society, and the current economic model doesn’t work, then something must be done, not just by the government but by all of us.