UK Journalism Rocking Along with Its Politics
Originally published at Outsell on May 19, 2010
Executive changes are sweeping the quality press in the UK, portending a time of greater change and disruption.
Important Details: The drama of the UK’s first coalition government in 70 years unfolded smartly on cable news, an especially intriguing quick change-over of power for American audiences, used to long interregnums and much pomp between Presidencies. Less covered has been the galloping change underway at many of the nation’s top newspaper companies, the “quality” papers, as distinguished from tabloid publications.
In recent weeks and months, consider the events:
- The Guardian has seen three significant changes in its executive ranks. At the top of the company, Carolyn McCall, CEO of the parent Guardian Media Group (GMG), is leaving to become CEO of airline EasyJet, after 24 years with the company. Simon Waldman, long the director of digital strategy and development at GMG, has left to head group product direction for the DVD rental subscription service, LoveFilm, as that Netflix-like company moves increasingly digital. Emily Bell, who directed digital content for Guardian News & Media and led much of the growth of the site that now reaches 36 million unique visitors worldwide, is leaving the company to lead the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at New York’s Columbia University.
- The Telegraph Editor-in-Chief Will Lewis is leaving the Telegraph Media Group, whose Daily Telegraph had just won newspaper of the year honors. Lewis’ unexpected departure apparently derived from his want to concentrate on and re-structure the Telegraph’s digital business.
- The daily Independent and weekly Independent on Sunday, a spirited part of the quality press, changed ownership, owing to the financial woes of its parent company, Independent News and Media. INM retains ownership of its flagship Irish Independent. The new owner is Independent Print Limited (IPL), the company run by Alexander Lebedev, the Russian oligarch (and among top 400 richest people on the planet, according to Forbes) who first made news when he bought the London Evening Standard in January 2009. Lebedev has turned the Evening Standard into a more widely read, 600,00-circulation free daily, winning a strong place in the evening commuter newspaper business. Now, having paid £1 and gained £9.25 million from INM towards operating costs, IPL is assessing the Independent’s future. Will the money-losing operation be taken free, as was the Evening Standard, or will it try hybrid free/paid strategies? One key question: How will IPL embrace the digital future? The Evening Standard’s web play has been a minor one, but the Independent, though small-staffed, has built a path forward for the company. Will IPL recognize digital as an essential part of a going-forward strategy?
- News Corp’s key quality papers — the Times of London and the Sunday Times — will begin charging for web access in June. The plan, part of News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch’s much-talked-about efforts to get readers to pay for more of the freight in the news business, includes free web access for print subscribers. Non-subscribers can get a digital subscription for £2, or a day’s access for £1, to two new sites, www.thetimes.co.uk and www.sundaytimes.co.uk. International pricing — key because more than half of the sites’ traffic has come from outside the UK — has been set at $2/€1.5 a day or $4/€3 for a week.
These changes are set against a background of fast-declining print circulation. While the The Independent on Sunday showed a 1.88% gain in the most recent ABC tally, other quality papers – The Sunday Telegraph, The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian, the Observer (also owned by GMG) — all reported double-digit declines, year-over-year.
Implications: Newspaper people come and go — but not usually so many in such a short period of time. It’s clear that the unsettled, post-recession, early-recovery period is not one of going back to old times, but of finding new footing in still-moving sand.
All the familiar questions are at play here, including:
- paid and free, as moves by the Times and the Independent may bring chaos and understanding to what it is consumers will and won’t pay for;
- digital integration/separation, as newsprint-legacy companies struggle with what it means to become digital-first publishers;
- how to keep innovators employed in the old industries, as new “green-field” digital companies offer less complicated, more direct routes to digital business success.
The UK moves have many parallels in the US, but the concentration of them in so short a time portends new waves of news industry transformation, and maybe some regression, across the Western World.