10 Informed Spotlight


Has Brexit blocked press reform?


Facebook of behaving like “digital gangsters”. Zuckerberg, the MPs said, had “shown contempt” towards them for refusing to give evidence in person. Te commitee called for an independent regulator to oversee a new compulsory code of ethics for tech companies. In the wake of Cairncross, the duopoly finds itself at the centre of probes by the Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA) which, at the behest of the Chancellor, Philip Hammond, is investigating the fairness of the digital advertising market, and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, which is reviewing how that market is regulated. “Tese things are not happening


Ian Burrell says the Cairncross review of news has some good ideas, but are ministers listening?


Fiſteen years ago Dame Frances Cairncross swapped journalism for an eminent role in academia, just as a geeky student was hatching an enterprise in a Harvard dormitory that now dominates global media. Today, as Mark Zuckerberg’s


Facebook and its Silicon Valley sibling, Google, threaten to engulf advertiser-funded UK news, Dame Frances, who had long careers at Te Economist and Te Guardian before becoming rector of Exeter College, Oxford, was sought out to bail out her old


trade. Her government-backed Cairncross Review of the future of British quality journalism is central to a concerted, multi- agency pushback against the dominance of the digital duopoly which, as she noted in her final report, sucked up 54 per cent of the UK’s digital advertising in 2017. Research firm eMarketer predicts that share will reach 65 per cent by 2021. Te key Cairncross recommendation


is to ensure that an “unbalanced relationship” between online platforms and news outlets “does not jeopardise the financial viability of news publishers”. It calls for new codes of conduct between the two parties, overseen by a new regulator. Atacks on the duopoly are now coming


from all angles. Within days of Cairncross being published in February, Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media & Sport select commitee reported on its 18-month investigation into fake news, accusing


randomly,” says Polly Curtis, a former editor-in-chief of HuffPost UK and a member of the Cairncross advisory panel. “Watching how they are landing in sequence, I think there is a concerted effort to actually do something meaningful about this.” Mimi Turner, consulting chief marketing officer to News UK’s Wireless Group and an adviser to Cairncross, says big tech is no longer seen as an “Alice Trough the Looking Glass world” that is beyond regulation. “What feels very apparent is that governments and regulators all around the world are looking at Google and Facebook with a level of scrutiny that regulation didn’t try to address previously,” she said. But Cairncross was about more than


protecting news from big tech’s impact on the ad market. Its mission was also to assess how journalism was reporting on public bodies, nationally and locally. Te 156-page final report is a sobering snapshot of the UK news industry in 2019. It highlights how the number of “full- time frontline” journalists working in the UK has fallen from 23,000 in 2007 to 17,000 today. In that period, newspaper annual advertising spend dropped by 69 per cent (£3.2 billion) and annual circulation revenue declined by 23 per cent (£500 million). Cairncross concludes that quality journalism in the UK is in such a parlous


Mark Tomas


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