10 Informed


Te Guardian’s readers are willing to pay


(1 million have contributed although its website is free) but it will narrowly miss its target to break even this year. Te paper is suffering from its premature retreat from print (still a major component of its income) and must persuade supporters that one-off donations may not sustain its journalism in perpetuity. Nonetheless, the paper’s financial Houdini act, aſter previous annual losses of £69m, shows it is on the right side of a divide between titles that generate reader revenue online and those that can’t. Digital ad revenues will grow as publishers pool resources and exploit technology to offer beter-targeted programmatic advertising in trusted contexts. But it won’t be enough to stave off job losses at organisations that are over-reliant on advertising. Daily Mail publisher, DMGT, saw shares


fall 10 per cent in November when its annual results showed a 16 per cent drop in profits. Te paper -– which suffered a 5 per cent fall in circulation revenue – risks a reader backlash in 2019 aſter new editor, Geordie Greig, (who replaced Dacre in 2018) diluted its editorial position to champion Teresa May’s soſt Brexit plan. News Group Newspapers, publisher of Te Sun titles, lost £91.2m in the year to July and its ambitions are being hampered by huge legal costs related to the long- running phone hacking scandal. Not for 50 years has Rupert Murdoch had such litle influence over UK media as he will have in 2019 following his departure from Sky aſter its acquisition by Comcast. For the BBC, 2019 could be especially bruising. No mater how Brexit plays out, I cannot see how its reputation for impartiality can escape further damage from such a polarising issue. On top of that, it needs to make major budget cuts this year while under atack from every sector in which it used to dominate. It also needs to extricate itself from paying out many millions from its budget to pay for the TV licences of over-75s BBC radio faces increased competition


from wealthy commercial rivals which have poached the star BBC presenters Chris Evans and Eddie Mair. In video, it is braced for the streaming


wars that will proliferate during 2019 and drive up the price of production talent. Netflix, having overtaken Sky in subscriptions, is planning a major UK push, but rival services from Disney, Apple and Warner will launch this year. British public broadcasters should heed Ofcom’s advice and create a joint streaming service but, given the lack of progress since this was mooted in 2007, there’s litle hope of seeing it this year. On the global news front, the BBC faces


increasing state-sponsored competition, notably from China’s government-funded China Global Television Network, which begins an ambitious European service this year from studios in London. Tere is even a challenge from the


former BBC Director of News, James Harding, who will in April launch Tortoise, a platform for “slow news”. Tortoise, which aims for 40,000 members and has raised £500,000 in crowdfunding, promises to ignore breaking news and to cover about four stories in depth each day, choosing topics at open news conferences called “Tinkins”. If it works, it could be the first British digital native news outlet of genuine scale, but it will serve informed audiences that already pay for periodicals or news subscriptions, and won’t answer the crisis at the base of journalism’s pyramid. Another new platform that will roll out in 2019 is News Over Audio (Noa), an audio journalism service founded by two young Irishmen, Gareth Hickey and Shane Ennis. It uses professional narrators to voice articles from a range of titles, including Te Economist, Te Independent and the Financial Times. It arrived on Amazon’s voice-activated Alexa platform at Christmas and is being extended to Google Assistant and in-car entertainment systems. So 2019 will be a time of fresh ideas and


innovation. Like the original renaissance it will also be brutal and bloody.


BuzzFlop? Te year started with dire tidings for the digital sector as BuzzFeed said it was cuting global headcount by 15 per cent – with 17 editorial jobs to go in London. Tis followed on the heels of news that 800 jobs will be lost at HuffPost, Yahoo and AOL, all owned by telecoms giant Verizon. Tese purely digital players had planned to engage young readers in news and to see off the legacy publishers of the dead-trees era. Investors believed the hype and rushed to fund what they thought was the future. Vice dropped its snarky tone to embrace serious journalism. BuzzFeed, previously known for irreverent ‘listicles’ aimed at millennials, began spending on investigative reporting and hired former Guardian deputy editor Janine Gibson to run its ambitious UK newsroom; she leſt the company last month. Te latest cuts come aſter pre- tax losses of £1.9m on turnover of £33.4m in 2017. Te company’s problems seem to run deep; it laid off 100 employees last year and there is talk of damage-limiting mergers with other digital outlets. BuzzFeed’s downfall was its over- reliance on Facebook for traffic and revenue. Aſter being fingered as the source of fake news, Mark Zuckerberg diverted his platform’s all-powerful algorithm away from news, making it far harder for publishers to distribute content. According to eMarketer, the already vast digital advertising revenues made by Facebook and Google will grow by 75 per cent between 2017 and 2020. Te rest will get crumbs.


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