Struan Bartlett is the CEO and Editor-in-Chief of NewsNow, the UK’s largest independent news discovery platform.
The Coronavirus crisis has further exposed a weakness and lack of resilience in the ad-funded sector of the news industry that is putting plurality in public interest journalism at risk. Publications that have been coping better with the crisis give us some pointers on how to support and strengthen media plurality and resilience.
Advertising demand has slumped and rates have crashed. Advertisers are unwilling to advertise next to the coronavirus news that is dominating the news agenda. Lucrative news topics like sport, which have been subsidising public interest journalism in the ad-funded sector, are drying up.
It is a triple blow for the ad-funded news industry, within which investment in public interest journalism had already been pared back to the bone – as alternative means for advertisers to reach eyeballs outside the traditional news media expanded exponentially online, as the digital ad market became dominated by two players, and as GDPR and ePrivacy rightly threatened targeted advertising – leading some segments of the news media to rely increasingly on ‘clickbait’ to maximise ad revenues and make returns to shareholders.
Among the news media hardest hit are the freesheets, dependent as they are on print distribution and advertising.
Among the news media with the best prospects of survival, will be those that deliver digitally, and generate income directly from readers – via subscription revenues or recurring donations – and those that benefit from some form of public funding, such as the BBC.
Initiatives from Google and Facebook, such as the Google News Initiative and Facebook’s multimillion pound contracts with news organisations, are to be welcomed. But the generosity of big tech firms shouldn’t be relied upon.
And with the general public under financial pressure, no doubt even segments of the news media reliant on reader income will also suffer.
The NUJ has recognised this in its recent calls for a News Recovery Plan that would “sustain the press and media through the Covid-19 crisis and reinvigorate the industry into a reimagined future […] to create a healthy diverse press, focussed squarely on the public good, one that can be sustained now and into the future.”
We wholeheartedly support these aims. It now makes sense that we consider some form of public funding to support public interest journalism, for which the need in local and regional news media is particularly acute.
How could public funds be raised and spent?
Public funds could be raised through the Digital Services Tax as the NUJ has proposed, or through a levy on broadband subscriptions as the BBC has recently proposed to replace the Licence Fee – or indeed a combination of the two.
But two things are crucial: the government must avoid picking winners; and – to paraphrase Defra – public money should be for public goods.
For these reasons, we would propose a series of measures that directs public funds at those news services that readers most value.
The NUJ has proposed free vouchers for online or print subscriptions be issued to all 18-and-19-year olds. We would go further and argue that such a scheme should apply to all persons of voting age.
The NUJ has also proposed tax credits for households with subscriptions to news services. This should certainly include donations to non-profit news organisations that do not currently benefit from charitable status.
To turbo-charge the move to reader-funding, we would also propose the UK government match-fund a proportion of all subscription or donation revenues to qualifying public interest news organisations.
In all measures that employ public money, preference should be given to models of ownership and doing business that maximise public ‘goods’, whether that means social enterprises that engage people locally, journalistic cooperatives that share profits fairly, non-profits that invest all revenues into news production, or organisations making public interest journalism freely available.
In this way, public money would only be used carefully to foster the growth of reader-funded public interest journalism.
Conclusion
It is widely accepted that a vibrant pluralistic public interest news media is essential for informing the public and leads to good governance.
With the collapse of ad funding as a funding model, and diminishing prospects of a fast rebound, the government has a role to play in supporting and encouraging reader funding through the strategic raising and allocation of public funds.
It is critical that any public funding, earmarked to support the plurality in public interest journalism the nation needs, is not used to prop up unsustainable business models or increase returns to shareholders.
Instead, public funding must be used to support news organisations using, or pivoting towards, the more resilient reader-funded business models of the 21st century.
Struan Bartlett is the CEO and Editor-in-Chief of NewsNow, the UK’s largest independent news discovery platform. With 12m users and 200m page views monthly, NewsNow.co.uk is a UK top 50 website, and a global top 50 news destination.
Founded in 1997 to democratise the market for news, NewsNow presents headlines from editorially-selected sources around the world to people who want to read more widely and think more critically.
By offering up different perspectives and stories covered from a range of angles, NewsNow helps people to compare and contrast opposing viewpoints, spot differing presentations of the facts, challenge their preconceptions, make their own minds up, and stay abreast of topics they are passionate about.