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Out of Print
i
ii
THIS PAGE IS INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK
Out of Print
Newspapers,
journalism and
the business of
news in the
digital age
George Brock
KoganPage
iii
First published in Great Britain and the United States in 2013 by Kogan Page Limited
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review,
as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be
reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in
writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms
and licences issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should
be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned addresses:
2nd Floor, 45 Gee Street 1518 Walnut Street, Suite 1100 4737/23 Ansari Road
London EC1V 3RS Philadelphia PA 19102 Daryaganj
United Kingdom USA New Delhi 110002
www.koganpage.com India
© George Brock, 2013
The right of George Brock to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
ISBN 978 0 7494 6651 0
E-ISBN 978 0 7494 6652 7
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brock, George, 1951-
Out of print : newspapers, journalism and the business of news in the digital age / George Brock.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-7494-6651-0 (pbk.) – ISBN 978-0-7494-6652-7 (ebook) 1. Newspaper publishing–
Great Britain–Finance. 2. Newspaper publishing–United States–Finance. 3. Newspaper
publishing–Economic aspects–Great Britain. 4. Newspaper publishing–Economic aspects–
United States. 5. Online journalism–Economic aspects–Great Britain. 6. Online journalism–
Economic aspects–United States. 7. Press–Economic aspects–Great Britain. 8. Press–
Economic aspects–United States. 9. Digital media–Economic aspects–Great
Britain. 10. Digital media–Economic aspects–United States. I. Title.
PN5114.F5B76 2013
070.50942–dc23
2013020898
Typeset by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong
Print production managed by Jellyfish
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Publisher’s note
Every possible effort has been made to ensure that the information contained in this book
is accurate at the time of going to press, and the publisher and author cannot accept
responsibility for any errors or omissions, however caused. No responsibility for loss or
damage occasioned to any person acting, or refraining from action, as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by the editor, the publisher or the author.
iv
To my father
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Contents
About the author x
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction: from ink to link 1
01 Communicating whatever we please 6
Messy, unethical and opinionated origins 9
Select and noteworthy happenings 11
An explosion of opinion 14
Playing with fire 16
‘Bible, ax and newspapers’ 21
A brief flowering 23
The world’s great informer 25
Every species of intelligence 27
02 Furnishing the world with a new set of nerves 31
A great moral organ 32
The true Church of England 34
The Steam Intellect Society 36
We are all learning to move together 37
A vast agora 41
I order five virgins 43
The few dozen lines of drivel 45
A press typhoon 48
The waning power of the harlot 50
03 The gilded age 55
A fluid mass 56
The brute force of monopoly 57
Sorrow, sorrow, ever more 60
A well-conducted press 61
‘So will it be goodbye to Fleet Street?’ 64
Contents
Contents vii
I n t r o d u c t i o n :
from ink to link 1
Communicating whatever we please 6
Messy, unethical and opinionated origins 9
Select and noteworthy happenings11
An explosion of opinion 14
Playing with fire 16
‘Bible, ax and newspapers’ 21
A brief flowering 23
The world’s great informer 25
Every species of intelligence 27
Notes 29
Furnishing the world with a new set of nerves 31
A great moral organ 32
The true Church of England 34
The Steam Intellect Society 36
We are all learning to move together 37
A vast agora 41
I order five virgins 43
The few dozen lines of drivel 45
A press typhoon 48
The waning power of the harlot 50
Notes 52
The gilded age 55
A fluid mass 56
The brute force of monopoly 57
Sorrow, sorrow, ever more 60
A well-conducted press 61
‘So will it be goodbye to Fleet Street?’ 64
I really loathe people with power 67
Deregulation 69
Boom and decline 73
Owners, news and celebrity 77
Notes 80
The engine of opportunity 83
Chain reaction 85
Utopia or dystopia? 88
What the internet does to the business of news 91
Notes 104
Rethinking journalism again 106
Complexity 108
Frontiers fade and vanish 109
Ink marks on squashed trees 110
Comparison and choice 111
The downside risks of choice 113
Authority 115
Manipulation 117
Objectivity under strain 120
The advantages and drawbacks of institutions 122
The management of abundance 124
New media and change: a case study 128
Conclusion 131
Notes 133
The business
model crumbles 137
Over a cliff 138
Print is not dead 142
Palliative care for print 145
Flipping to digital 148
Making people pay: walls and meters 151
The demand for news 158
What we don’t know about online news 160
Notes 161
Credibility crumbles 164
Newsroom culture 165
Operation Motorman 169
Phone hacking 171
‘Quality’ and ‘seriousness’ 172
Trust and authority 177
A spell is broken 179
Notes 181
The Leveson judgement 183
Diagnosis 184
Prescription 188
A third way 190
Regulation’s future 193
Plurality 194
Notes 198
T h r o w i n g
s p a g h e t t i
at the wall200
Four core tasks 201
We were having journalistic moments! 204
Error is useful 219
Notes 221
Clues to
the future 223
Business models 224
From the ashes of dead trees 229
Notes 235
vii
viii Contents
I really loathe people with power 67
Deregulation 69
Boom and decline 73
Owners, news and celebrity 77
04 The engine of opportunity 83
Chain reaction 85
Utopia or dystopia? 88
What the internet does to the business of news 91
05 Rethinking journalism again 106
Complexity 108
Frontiers fade and vanish 109
Ink marks on squashed trees 110
Comparison and choice 111
The downside risks of choice 113
Authority 115
Manipulation 117
Objectivity under strain 120
The advantages and drawbacks of institutions 122
The management of abundance 124
New media and change: a case study 128
Conclusion 131
06 The business model crumbles 137
Over a cliff 138
Print is not dead 142
Palliative care for print 145
Flipping to digital 148
Making people pay: walls and meters 151
The demand for news 158
What we don’t know about online news 160
07 Credibility crumbles 164
Newsroom culture 165
Operation Motorman 169
Phone hacking 171
Contents ix
‘Quality’ and ‘seriousness’ 172
Trust and authority 177
A spell is broken 179
08 The Leveson judgement 183
Diagnosis 184
Prescription 188
A third way 190
Regulation’s future 193
Plurality 194
09 Throwing spaghetti at the wall 200
Four core tasks 201
We were having journalistic moments! 204
Error is useful 219
10 Clues to the future 223
Business models 224
From the ashes of dead trees 229
Index 237
About the author
George Brock is Professor and Head of Journalism at City University
London. He worked at The Times for many years, including as a
correspondent, Foreign Editor, Saturday Editor and Managing Editor. Before
that he worked as a reporter at The Observer and for the evening paper in
York. He was President of the World Editors’ Forum and is a member of the
International Press Institute board. He broadcasts frequently and blogs at
www.georgebrock.net
x
Acknowledgements
I owe thanks to countless people with whom I have discussed the business
of news, in the broadest sense of the term, over many years. I am grateful
to them all. I could not have found the freedom to write this book without
the help of Lis Howell, my esteemed colleague at City University London.
I thank Paul Hodges and Darrin Burgess, who read and commented on the
manuscript, and Mi Zhang and Charlotte Rettie, who helped with research.
None of the above are responsible for any of this book’s judgements or
errors. As ever, my greatest debt is to Kay, my most rigorous but most
gentle critic.
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“
Introduction:
from ink to link
The time is gone when one side of the (news) organization
can practise determined ignorance of the other.
Richard Gingras, Director of News, Google, 2012
I was chairing a lunchtime discussion on the prospects for the news media
in Britain and the United States when the speaker, a business columnist,
asked the audience in exasperation: ‘I mean, who on earth would take
advice on business from a journalism professor?’ This book does not
presume to hand out prescriptive advice to businessmen or women, but it
does try to explain what is happening to journalism and the business of
news and why it is happening. Many journalists would prefer to live in
ignorance of the business inside which they operate and some succeed in
doing so. But journalism is entangled with the business of news, like it or
not.
News and journalism are in the midst of an upheaval. These changes,
which have begun but are certainly not finished, force assumptions and
practices to be rethought from first principles. Journalists find themselves
at an inflection point. The internet is not simply a new publishing system,
allowing faster, wider distribution of material assembled and edited as it
has always been. The changes wrought by digital technology are transformative and not adaptive: they require journalism to be rethought. In different
societies these changes will work through in different ways and at varying
speeds. But the overall direction is plain: old habits of thought and behaviour have to be remade for new conditions.
This should hardly be a surprise: the ability to translate information into
bits and thus to move it cheaply, quickly and in quantity over great distances
reroutes much human communication and will have, however gradually,
profound effects in democratic practice, books, money, law and social organization, to name only a few areas of life affected. Wireless technology
1
2 Out of Print
and digitization profoundly alter the distribution of information of all kinds
and how we learn what we know. Some of that is what we call ‘news’. For
anyone who reads, watches or listens to news, the questions posed touch
basic assumptions: what we mean by ‘news’ – a flexible term that has taken
on different meanings in different eras – may change again. If anyone can be
a journalist thanks to cheap, simple electronic publishing technology, what
is a journalist and can we define what they do? If we can identify what it is
to be a journalist, exactly what value does it have in a wired society in which
individuals can share information in such volumes with such ease?
Journalists in the 21st century rarely stop to recall that ‘mainstream’
journalism has only been a short period in the history of public information.
The supply of information to democratic societies only matured as a massmarket industry in the 20th century, allowing journalism to be practised
and controlled in more concentrated and organized ways. Journalism of
an earlier era was smaller scale, more intimate, opinionated and much of it
resembled the social networks now carried by the internet.
In theory, the disruption of journalism is a matter of urgent concern to
democratic societies: is the free flow, integrity and independence of journalism not essential to citizens who vote? The luminaries who framed the
American constitution thought so when they forbade any limitation on
the freedom of ‘the press’ in the First Amendment to that document. But
journalism − as an idea, as a business − is something that many busy people
are not curious about. They take the media for granted; how journalists
do what they do is studied regularly only by a small community of experts.
Journalism and journalists may have been in the headlines about phonehacking in Britain, but the kind of public inquiry triggered by that scandal is
relatively rare across the world. Many journalists are defiantly uninterested
in their own business. Many consider reflection on it to be a distracting
waste of time and would not recognize, let alone endorse, the view that their
work is being turned upside down. This book hopes to explain to as wide
an audience as possible why the news media is undergoing such radical
alteration and what the result ought to be and might be. However, ‘ought’
and ‘might’ may not turn out to be the same thing.
Having worked as a journalist, I have interests and a perspective to
disclose at the start. I worked for newspapers for many years, beginning
as a reporter at an evening paper in Yorkshire and I was on the staff of
The Times from 1981 to 2009. I was a feature writer and editor, edited the
paper’s opinion page and was Foreign Editor. My last act as Foreign Editor
was to post myself abroad in 1991 as the newspaper’s correspondent in
Brussels when the solid certainties of Western Europe’s post-war life were
Introduction: From Ink to Link 3
dissolved by the collapse of the Soviet Empire to the east. I was later Saturday
Editor and, from 1997, Managing Editor, a job that gave me an insight into
the survival battles of printed media.
By the time I left, The Times was of course no longer only a newspaper
but both a printed object and a constantly updated website. I now direct a
university journalism school in London and enjoy the combined privilege of
training the next generation of journalists and having the distance from
daily journalism in order to reflect on what is happening to the work I once
did. I have tried to put my experience into useful shape. If at any point I am
critical of mistakes made by journalists (particularly in newspapers) in the
past 30 years or so, you may take it as read that I have myself committed
these same errors. My knowledge of what has gone wrong is derived from
direct experience. A little of my time as an editor was spent in global journalism networks; I have tried to ensure that my analysis and argument here
is not too Anglocentric or insular.
I was moved to write this book by taking part in many discussions about
journalism’s future. Many of these conversations were mournfully pessimistic. There was, and still is, much discouraging news to digest: many
printed newspapers will never be profitable again or never as profitable as
they once were. Most news websites, proclaiming themselves to be the
future, struggle to survive. But I was gradually struck by how shaky were
the assumptions underlying this pervasive gloom. The fact that journalism
has changed and will change further is not the same as its ruin. While I
may be pessimistic about parts of the business that support journalism,
I’m optimistic about the robust survival of journalism in the long run. I
want to show in this book that journalism in practice undergoes frequent
change in which its prominent institutions come under threat. Change is the
only constant in journalism’s history. People in well-established newspapers
or broadcast channels often identify journalism as themselves and their
organizations. If their organization is threatened, they think that journalism
itself must be in danger.
This is understandable but wrong. Journalism is an idea and a set of
values. Ideas are worthless if they cannot be put into practice; in this, strong
journalism institutions are important. But the idea of journalism is far
stronger than the bodies pursuing it. Those bodies frequently fail to live up
to their own values and are vulnerable to the winds and tides of change.
Instead of asking what will happen to newspapers or broadcasters, we
would do better to ask what will happen to the idea and ideals of journalism
when they meet new conditions? Or how can we ensure that the best ideas
and ideals of journalism are embedded in the new forms that journalism will