10 Informed Spotlight


Telling the news in crisis times


been sent home, for fear that they might spread the virus. You don’t have to listen in to many of these exchanges to realise that the Covid-19 crisis will reshape our media more profoundly than any single event in recent memory. Te response of the regional press has been predictably shabby. Supplicating themselves before government ministers in the hope of a bail out, they gravely describe themselves as “the forth emergency service”. “Communities depend upon us minister,” they intone. Call ended, many have acted brutally, without consultation, and in a manner that is apparently intent on not wasting a crisis. Newsquest, for example, announced that significant numbers, possibly 40 per cent, of editorial staff will be sent home on furlough with only the government’s income support to pay their bills. Te rest of the staff will endure a 15 per cent, across-the-board cut, quite possibly in breach of their employment contracts. JPIMedia announced it would stop printing most of its free newspapers, while titles such as the Edinburgh News (formerly the Edinburgh Evening News) told regular freelance contributors and casuals that there would be no further work until the end of the crisis. Te Racing Post will not publish for the


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Weekly since mid-March the Secretary of State for Culture has hosted a telephone conference. Senior editors, chief executives and proprietors, all representatives from the nation’s newspapers take it in turns to describe their circumstances. All are veterans of a decade of falling advertising revenue and disappearing circulation. Te fresh pain in their voices today is unmistakeable. One reports a 20 per cent fall in


advertising spend, another the halving of print sales over the course of a fortnight. Supermarkets are increasingly reluctant to stock newspapers, so dramatically have sales fallen. Delivery boys and girls have


foreseeable future, the Evening Standard is being delivered to homes for the first time and hand-out titles such as Time Out and Stylist have gone digital only. While the business model of much of the media has been dramatically undermined, public thirst for the news has become frenzied. Boris Johnson’s statement to the nation on 23 March was watched live by 27 million people. It was the largest ever audience for a television news event in the UK. Audience for all television news are believed to have doubled in the past fortnight and online news sources report their heaviest ever traffic.


Tis has been boosted by subscription- only sites such as the FT, the New York


Mat Kenyon


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