There are a number of reasons for the crisis in our press industry. Newspapers have traditionally made their money in two ways: by selling news to us, and selling us to advertisers. But advertisers are currently leaving newspapers in droves. Quite understandably they no longer find subsidising our news to be profitable, and are migrating to other more lucrative markets (online search engines, social networks, classified ad websites). At the same time, we as readers no longer feel inclined to pay upfront for news. The papers all put it online for free, why would we? There’s also the problem that decades of staff cuts have left journalism severely diminished in quality and independence. Perhaps the news just isn’t worth what it used to be.
Many critics leave the diagnosis of the problem at that, blaming inevitable and unavoidable changes in the market since the rise of the internet. But there’s another cause to this crisis, which can be located firmly in corporate management strategies, and the choices we’ve taken as societies about who owns newspapers, and how that ownership should be regulated. Even before the rise of the internet, free content, and new advertising markets, newspaper companies had been steadily cutting staff to maximise profits. Since the 1980s there’s been a trend in developed media markets towards consolidation: ever-fewer and larger companies buying up more and more papers. This was enabled by a string of UK governments caving in to pressure from industry to relax regulation on media ownership. Consolidation leads to problems with editorial independence and freedom of the press (as we’ve seen so clearly this summer with the influence of Murdoch), but it also encourages these big companies to cut staff in the name of creating efficiency savings across their media empires, and arguably to prioritise the generation of profits above the production of high quality news; to favour corporate interests over the public interest.
