Progress report

I was prompted to read the book at reference 1 by the NYRB and I am about 100 pages in. So far, it is all rather depressing.

Once upon a time, here in the UK, there used to be five serious daily newspapers: the Times, the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Telegraph and for a while the Independent. Plus there were serious newspapers in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. All of them ran serious news rooms and employed a lot of serious journalists - even allowing for their sometimes louche lifestyles. They were serious and responsible outfits, more interested in producing news and newspapers than in making profits - although one did need to at least break even, one did need to sell a lot of newspapers. With, for example, the annual revenues of the Guardian presently being of the order of £200m. A middle sized business.

Again, once upon a time, around half the revenue was from advertising, with the now more or less defunct classified advertisements being around half of that. Paying readers were never the whole story - which proved to be the opening for the freebies.

At that time, all the members of the serious and chattering classes - not to say the great and the good and the ruling classes - would buy a daily copy of at least one or other of them. They were prepared to pay a very modest sum each day to be told about the affairs of their country and of the world at large.

Whereas now, a significant proportion of them - of us - would rather read the free Metro on the way to work and top that up with browsing other freebies on the Internet. Not many newspapers have succeeded with Internet sites that you have to pay to use - even quality ones like references 3 and 4.

So the way things are going, we won't have any proper newspapers in a few years time, and we will depend on the likes of Rupert Murdoch and his children for our news.

PS: I did try to extract some print circulation figures from reference 2, snapped above, but stripped them out when I found that there were at least two, very different versions of the figures. More work needed on the statistics. Despite appearances, they are not free either!

Reference 1: Breaking News: the remaking of journalism and why it matters now - Alan Rusbridger - 2018.

Reference 2: https://www.newsworks.org.uk/.

Reference 3: https://www.theguardian.com/uk.

Reference 4: https://www.bbc.co.uk/.