Category: Media Trends
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After a decade or more of cuts and job losses a growing digital audience is holding out the prospect that local newspapers might soon be reaching a tipping point when online income outweighs the loss of print advertising.
At the launch of a new book on the future of local journalism – What Do We Mean By Local? – there was one overriding verdict: delivering news first to an online audience is not a threat to local newspapers but the only realistic way to drive up revenues for what should become the local news franchises of the future.
Ashley Highfield, chief executive of the Johnston Press, which has just completed the re-launch of nearly 200 websites attached to over 200 daily and weekly local newspapers, gave an upbeat assessment to a Media Society audience (10.10.2013).
“The only question is: ‘When is the tipping point when digital revenue growth outweighs the lost income on print?’ Perhaps it will be 2016.
“In some sections of our business digital revenue now amounts to 15 to 20 per cent of total advertising income; that is up from 10 per cent the previous year and 5 per cent the year before that.
“When that share of revenue becomes 20 to 30 per cent in the next eighteen months or so – a 30 per cent increase year on year – then the rate of growth in digital business will outweigh the decline in print income.
“And at that point we will reach a tipping point when we can achieve a profit without taking out costs; at last it will mean the business can grow.”
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Grave doubts about whether data protection authorities in Britain and across the European Union can ever deliver on a “right to be forgotten” were expressed at seminar organised by the Westminster eForum.
Both the Ministry of Justice and the UK Information Commissioner believe the newly-published European data protection framework review is in danger of raising “false expectations” on the part of the public about the possibility of individuals deleting personal information.
There was criticism at the seminar (8.3.2012) of what one speaker described as the “political gesturing” of the EU’s Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding.
Lord McNally, Minister of State at the Ministry of Justice, urged the EU to offer the twenty seven member states a workable solution. The right to erase data would not be possible if it related to health care, crime or a free press, nor could it apply to credit rating.
“Businesses should have rights too...we must not undermine responsible lending or financial agreements. We may set the standard so high we don’t get a model which can work in practice.”
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Secretly-filmed images of injured and apparently tortured dissenters lying shackled to their beds in a Syrian military hospital are another graphic reminder of the way devices such as mobile phone cameras have revolutionised the reporting of protests and uprisings.
Hardly a day goes by when television news bulletins do not feature dramatic pictures – either from the Arab spring or perhaps a demonstration on the streets of London – and their influence on public opinion cannot be under-estimated.
If thirty years ago there had been the kind of footage which activists can upload now on to the internet via video sharing sites like YouTube, there might well have been a different outcome to historic British struggles like the 1984-5 pit strike.
Photographers and camera crews were regularly corralled and held back behind Police lines during the violent industrial confrontations of the 1980s. As a result there were very few of the graphic images which feature so prominently in today’s newspapers and television news bulletins and which show almost as-live footage of the conditions facing protestors as they are being driven back by police or security forces..
One striking image from the notorious 1984 Battle of Orgreave at the height of the pit strike – showing a mounted policeman raising his baton against a woman protestor – came to symbolise, especially for the left, the doomed struggle by mining communities to protect their jobs.
A photograph captured by chance illustrated the one-sided nature of the conflict and the mineworkers’ vulnerability in the face of the massive superiority of the massed ranks of mounted police officers. But one fleeting image, reproduced by a few newspapers, had nothing like the impact of the sustained output of today’s citizen journalists.
Just think what the response might have been if strikers who took on Margaret Thatcher’s government had been able to upload their own footage of a picket’s eye view of being charged by mounted police or the often unrecorded violence and brutality which they say occurred in the mining villages.
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Vince Cable was heading for a fall once the party’s President Tim Farron MP began boasting (Any Questions, Radio 4 10.12.2010) that only the Liberal Democrats had the courage to “drag Rupert Murdoch in front of the broadcasting regulator Ofcom.”
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