28/09/2022
Why pay good money to buy a paper?
A man reads a newspaper next to youths scrolling their phones.
You may well still look at the news on your phone, perhaps checking the "snippets" that Google News offers you for free. You may watch the news on television or listen to the radio. But you are much less likely to pay for news that your parents were – let alone your grandparents.
In one sense, this is a golden age for news. Twitter, TikTok, YouTube and of course Google all offer news stories. Facebook encourages friends and families to chat about it, and to compare notes on evolving local news. Why pay good money to buy a paper, or sign up for a subscription, when you can get the gist of the main stories for nothing?
The obvious answer is that none of those sites employs professional journalists, who understand how to grasp the essence of a story and package it for a large audience. Take the astonishing achievement of Robert Moore and his team of Britain's ITV on January 6, 2021. Having guessed that there might be trouble before the inauguration of Joe Biden, and suspecting that the Capitol might be involved, he made it into the building with a cameraman and a producer, the only group of journalists to breach the perimeter. Or take the shattering scoop by two journalists on the Financial Times, who in October 2021 took U.S. intelligence by surprise with a story that China had tested a new hypersonic missile with devastating space capability. Both items of news took trained fulltime journalists – with specialized skills and luck on their side.
Television news survives on advertising – and vast amounts of advertising that once paid much of the cost of news gathering has now migrated to Google and other online sites. Newspapers like the Financial Times need paying customers as well as ads. Many newspapers are now free online – even if they still charge for their paper version. But that cannot be a long-term business proposition. In 2019, I edited a report to the British government on "A Sustainable Future for Journalism," which looked closely both at the plight of the news business and at possible ways forward.