The state of the UK Local Media – facts and figures

In their discussion document Local and Regional Media in the UK Ofcom outline some interesting figures in terms of the state of the UK media. They tell us:

In Radio there are

• 80 commercial local radio operators, managing approx 300 services
• A growing number of community radio services – 200 have been licenced to date with over 150 already broadcasting
• Two radio groups own 40 percent of local radio stations

In Newspapers there are:

• 90 regional and local newspaper publishers
• 1300 titles
• Five newspaper groups control about 70% of local ownership

Local Television

• One company (ITV) holds all Channel 3 licences in England and Wales

Ofcom also tell us that in the UK:

• Regional TV news is watched at least once a day by four fifths of adults
• Half of all adults listen to local radio or read a free paper at least weekly
• Two fifths read a paid for local paper at least weekly
• One in five use local commercial news websites

What about the Internet?

• A third of adults with broadband say they use local websites at least weekly
• The internet is the main source of news for just 6 percent of people

The Kindle – only a threat to books, not newspapers?

That certainly seems to be the view of BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones. Trying out Amazon’s new Kindle ‘moving global, but still only available from the USA’, he found it very easy to use: “Plug it in, charge it, download your first book and you’re away. Then subscribe to a digital edition of a newspaper and it is wired to you in the morning, via the Kindle’s “whispernet” 3g connection.”

He believes that its strong point is its integration with the Amazon store and suggests they are looking to Apple’s iTunes as an example of what can be done using download technology.

He was impressed with the experience of it all: “When I started reading, it felt pretty close to the paper experience. There’s no glare on the Kindle’s screen, so you get simple black text on a cream background, with just enough added bells and whistles. You can make digital notes, search the text, and, if you fall asleep with the book on your face as is my wont, it will remember which page you were on when you turn it on again.”

Having said this, he doesn’t believe that newspapers should feel under threat, the way way book sellers eventually might. This is because reading a book is an ‘analogue’ experience (he probably meant ‘linear’), starting at page one and continuing till the finish. “A newspaper, on the other hand, is more random, more interactive. I scan the sections and leap from one article to another, much as I do on the web. That’s what is already available to me – for free – on newspaper websites, so why would I pay for a less satisfactory digital newspaper?”

How to place a fake story in a Tabloid Newspaper

According to a fascinating story by Gary Neale in the Press Gazette, film makers behind an new feature documentary about the UK tabloids have successfully duped the Sun, the Mirror, the Star and the Express into publishing fake stories by the simple method of phoning up the tip off numbers placed in the tabloids.

Their film, ”Starsuckers’” which opens on 30 October, describes itself as “a feature documentary about the celebrity obsessed media, that uncovers the real reasons behind our addiction to fame and blows the lid on the corporations and individuals who profit from it”. They claim that amongst the stories that they successfully planted were:

• Sparks from a fuse which blew at the flat of singer Amy Whinehouse set fire to her beehive hairdo: Mirror and Star;
• Director Guy Ritchie received a black eye after juggling cutlery: The Sun;
• Singer Sarah Harding is into quantum physics: The Sun;
• Comedian Russell Brand wanted to be a banker when he was a child: Daily Express;
• Pixie Geldof stuffed pick and mix sweets into her bra: The Daily Mirror.

The director of the movie, Chris Atkins, told The Guardian: “Had those fake stories been fact-checked by the newspapers before they were printed, they would have realised – I think within minutes – that they were about to publish complete and utter babble.”

Problems in the Newspaper Industry – what’s the alternative?

With the continuing financial problems facing the press, I’ve been turning my thoughts to different models of financing.  Here’s an extract from the Scott Trust’s website (the owners of the Guardian) about this:

“The Manchester Guardian (now the Guardian) was founded in 1821 to support social reform in the aftermath of the Peterloo massacre. The newspaper gained an international reputation under long-serving editor and latterly owner CP Scott (pictured above).

The Scott Trust was created in 1936 following the death of CP Scott and his son Edward in 1932. Edward’s brother John was left as the sole owner, and was faced with the threat of death duties, which would have crippled the business and jeopardised the future independence of the newspaper.

To avoid this, and to secure his father’s legacy of the Manchester Guardian’s independent liberal journalism, John Scott voluntarily renounced all financial interest in the business for himself and his family, putting all his shares – worth more than £1 million at the time – into a trust.

This extraordinary act of philanthropy resulted in a unique form of media ownership in the UK, which has now lasted more than 70 years.

The core purpose of the Scott Trust is:

• To secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity: as a quality national newspaper without party affiliation; remaining faithful to its liberal tradition; as a profit-seeking enterprise managed in an efficient and cost-effective manner.
• All other activities should be consistent with the central objective. The Company which the Trust owns should: be managed to ensure profits are available to further the central objective; not invest in activities which conflict with the values and principles of the Trust.
• The values and principles of the Trust should be upheld throughout the Group. The Trust declares a subsidiary interest in promoting the causes of freedom in the press and liberal journalism, both in Britain and elsewhere.”

Some people have recently argued that in Scotland, one way to consolidate the the Herald and the Scotsman might be to merge them and put on a similar foundation. However whether the political and financial exists to put aside media firm (and Scottish East West) rivalry is extremely unlikely. In addition, recent troubles at the Observer – sister paper of the Guardian, have put the financial advantages of such a trust in a less than perfect light.

Pressure increases on BBC as BNP given Radio 1 coverage

Increased pressure is being put on the BBC following what is being argued as shaky handling of the British National Party in terms of broadcasting rights.

Recently two officials of the BNP were interviewed on BBC’s main youth channel Radio 1 Newsbeat  as ‘young supporters’ of the far right party. A link to the BNP website was also provided from the Newsbeat on-line page. No equivalent link however was given to the anti-nazi research group Searchlight who specialise in examining the activities of the BNP and other far-right groups

It is known that the BNP has been cultivating a youth audience for several years, and critics feel the interview was far from challenging to the claims made by the neo-nazis. Critics also feel the BBC was guilty of giving a false impression to its listeners given the true identity of those interviewed was hidden.

This was condemned by Cabinet minister Peter Hain who wrote  in The Guardian:

“BBC executives have told me of their obligation to respect the right of a minority who have voted for the BNP. However, that right is already adequately upheld in BNP party election broadcasts, and when they are interviewed on political programmes such as Today or Newsnight – although the recent Radio 1 Newsbeat interview with two ‘young BNP members’ casts serious doubt on the BBC’s grip of the subject.”

Hain points out that  the BBC did not reveal that the individuals were BNP publicity director Mark Collett (who with Nick Griffiths had previously stood trial for inciting racial hatred – something else not mentioned in the interview) and Joseph Barber, who runs BNP record label Great White Records.

Hain said: “If the content were not distasteful enough – descriptions of the London-born England footballer Ashley Cole as ‘not ethnically British’ and ‘coming to this country’ passed without proper challenge – even more worrying is the revelation that these members, still introduced simply as Joey and Mark on the BBC website, are key members of the BNP hierarchy…Would the BBC allow any other party’s spin doctors to appear anonymously? The interview was in clear breach of basic journalistic practice, and of official BBC and National Union of Journalist guidelines. Read more

The Difficult Future of Regional TV news.

Regional TV news – a critical part of Public Service Broadcasting, is facing a crisis according to OfCom figures.

In late September the media regulator warned that providing regional news programmes on ITV could cost broadcasters up to £64m per year by 2012.

They argue that this will make the provision of local news on ITV unsustainable by 2012

Publication of Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report in June indicated government support for a series of independent consortia consisting of local media as an alternative to the BBC in the UK’s regions and nations.

Despite the work done by the Scottish Broadcasting Commission earlier in the previous year, Carter’s report seemed woefully ill-informed about the work already done by this commission.

Now it appears that three pilot projects are to be launched in England, Wales and Scotland – with STV and a collection of Scottish Newspapers expressing interest in bidding for one of the pilots.

At present however this is complicated by the legal action between ITV and STV where the latter is being sued by the former to the tune of £38m.

OfCom have argued such pilots could be financed by top-slicing the licence fee – something opposed both by the BBC and the BBC Trust.

Mail on-line most read UK brand worldwide

For world-wide readers of UK newspapers, the Mail on-line continued to be the most read brand in July of this year with 29.9 million global readers, according to the Press Gazette’s ABC (Audit Bureau of Circulation) figures.

For readers based in the UK however, the Guardian remains the favorite on-line site, with 9.9 million unique readers – on a worldwide scale they have a reader base of  27 million.

Current ABC circulation figures for hard copy National Broadsheets were:

Dailies:

Daily Telegraph: 814,087, down 5.4 per cent

The Times: 576,185, down 6.0 per cent

Financial Times: 395,845, down 5.2 per cent

The Guardian: 311,387, down 6.4 per cent

The Independent: 187,837, down 18.3 per cent

Daily Sunday papers:

The Sunday Times: 1,164,831, down 0.72 per cent

The Sunday Telegraph: 599,131, down 3.1 per cent

The Observer: 361,761, down 12 per cent

Independent on Sunday: 160,809, down 18.3 per cent

Google is no newspaper vampire

Or at least that’s according to Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO in a long interview with Danny Sullivan of Searchengineland.com. In a week when Rupert Murdoch seems to have slightly eased his attacks on  ‘Internet News Thieves’ Schmidt claims that Google actually helps newspapers by pointing its visitors to ‘sources of quality content’. He further claims that only existing mainstream news institutions have the resources and established trust to do deep journalism. Surprisingly although he acknowledges that new online publications have emerged and that there are journalists working independently of large companies, his faith, according to Sullivan is ‘still with the old school, so to speak’.

Schmidt also claims in the interiew that critics often target Google, when their real target is the internet:

“I think in this case Google is a proxy for the internet as a whole. So the people would make the same statements about the Internet as they do about Google. Substitute the internet for Google and you get that idea. And because we play such a central role in information, we’ve become somewhat used to being blamed for everything. In some cases people don’t understand that we’re a conduit to other people doing things. They think Google did it when in fact somebody else did it and made it available.”

In terms of solutions, one that he suggests is Google Fast Flip. Readers can try it here.

BBC Trust to journalists: ‘Don’t Blog what you wouldn’t say’

One of the lesser known aspects of the new BBC draft editorial guidelines appears to take their definition of impartiality even further than previously understood, in their new advice that “Nothing should be written by [BBC] journalists and presenters that would not be said on-air.”

According to the guidance: “Our audiences should not be able to tell from BBC programmes or other BBC output the personal prejudices of our journalists and presenters on such matters.” .

“This applies as much to online content as it does to news bulletins”.

This is an issue that is sure to result in comment during the consultation on the guidelines as while this point of view will be what some viewers will want others may  question  whether this is taking the guidelines too far in that the audience are able to tell the difference between personal opinion – when it is served up as personal opinion – and ‘impartial’ news reports broadcast on behalf of the BBC by these individual journalists in their capacity as newsreaders or reporters.

Meanwhile the Government continues to support it’s own guidelines on departmental use of Twitter – guidelines which  at a word count of almost 5,500, would be equivalent to more than 250 tweets. Suggesting that departmental users should tweet no less than two times per day, with a maximum of ten daily tweets, it suggests that departments should steer clear of ‘self-promotion’.  In supporting Departments to follow usual Twitter etiquette that ‘followers’ should be ‘followed back’ it cautions that at all costs however, it is necessary to avoid the image of ‘big brother’ following people for the wrong reasons. And we know what the Daily Mail would say about that.

Rupert to the Internet: It’s War

Rupert Murdoch has started a war on the internet that he cannot win according to his own biographer Michael Wolff. Writing in the latest copy of Vanity Fair Wolff suggests that Murdoch’s problem is partly due to the fact ‘he really doesn’t understand the internet’.

“You get a dreadful harrumph when you talk to Murdoch about user-created content, or even simple linking to other sites. He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t buy it. He doesn’t want it. Every conversation I’ve had with him about the new news, about the fundamental change in how people get their news—that users go through Google to find their news rather than to a specific paper—earned me a walleyed stare”

Taking the example of Murdoch’s greatest on-line asset – Jeremy Clarkson, who reputedly is responsible for 25 percent of Times on-line traffic – Wolff points out that event if there are enough ‘fanatical Clarkson readers’ who will pay enough to make a ‘paid Clarkson more valuable than a free, ad-supported one’, Murdoch’s gain is Clarkson’s loss – which will be most of his readers and their ‘constant and addictive feedback’.

Meanwhile the latest to support Murdoch’s War on free content is Financial Times managing director Rob Grimshaw. Talking to the Association of Online Publisher’s conference in London he claimed that  most publishers will have no option but to charge for online content. In this he was echoing the sentiment of Financial Times chief executive, John Ridding, who last week advocated paid-for as the only way to safeguard quality journalism.

Ridding had claimed: “I simply can’t see how its possible to make a pure advertising-funded model work unless you have enormous scale and really I’m talking about a billion page views plus per month.

According to the Press Gazette, which reported this story a survey of AOP members last week had suggested that almost 70 per cent were looking at charging online. However, a Harris Poll last month found that just five per cent of readers would be willing to pay to access news websites.

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