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more than 400 staff for its Live portfolio during 2021, launching 26 new websites and sub-brands to cover every county in England and Wales. Other publishers took on new staff to defend their patches. Newsquest hired 50 digital staff in May and also launched Te National in Wales as a compact paper and website to rival Reach’s Wales Online. Norfolk-based Archant hired 70 staff in summer to protect its heartlands, but it also closed most of its regional offices to save money and allow more staff to work from home, a strategy pioneered by Reach earlier in the year when it announced a retrenchment to 15 regional news hubs. In the independent new sector, launches have included Reading Today and the Stroud Times. Manchester start- up, Te Mill, marked its first anniversary by registering more than 1,000 paying members and producing a special print edition. Last year it opened sister sites Te Post (Liverpool) and the Sheffield Tribune, all hosted on the online publishing platform Substack. But independents have been hit hard economically by the pandemic, with many small outlets facing destitution, so the Public Interest News Foundation launched a philanthropy-backed grants programme to support such publishers in London and Birmingham. Te long-running Salford Star closed in 2021 – a popular community-run operation commended by local figures from actor Maxine Peak to musician Peter Hook. “We lived in the area and were part of that community. Our kids were at school here and we were in the local shops,” says editor Stephen Kingston. “But for the previous 10 years I had been working for virtually no pay at all.” He claims Salford is without dedicated media, except Salford Now – produced by journalism students at the University of Salford. Tere are no such financial hardships at the FT where Japanese owner Nikkei rewarded staff with bonuses of £5,600 and a party stocked with sake and sushi


to celebrate what chief executive, John Ridding, described as “an exceptional performance in 2021”. Te rest of the national press reflects this new optimism. In a Press Gazete new year’s survey, Daily Mirror editor, Alison Phillips, said newsleters would enable audience growth, while Te Sun editor, Victoria Newton, stressed the value of reader data and Te Times’s editor, John Witherow, claimed his paper was entering a “golden era” in which it would put added emphasis on “audio, video and interactives”.


“Aſter two decades of dire predictions about the future of news, publishers are awash with profits.”


Tis upturn is dwarfed by the financial gains of the Big Tech companies during the pandemic as they transformed into trillion-dollar organisations. Google’s owner Alphabet, Meta and Amazon were, by a long distance, the three biggest online publishers in the UK last year and together they swallowed up more than half of global advertising outside of the People’s Republic of China. But signs are that the tide may be turning as countries atempt greater regulation – and Canada is set to follow Australia in forcing the tech giants to pay for its use of news. A story in the Mail on Sunday, from “DCMS sources” said Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries is in favour of the Digital Markets Unit having a remit to force Google and Facebook to pay for the stories they carry. Te source said: ‘Te new regime will be an important vehicle to tackle the imbalance of power between the largest platforms and publishers.”


Te Competition Markets Authority also gave a signal of intent in November by ordering Meta, owner of Facebook, to sell the GIF platform Giphy, which it


bought in May 2020. Te CMA ruled that Meta already had too much control over social media with ownership of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. In magazines and periodicals, star


performers include Zillah Byng-Torne and Zanny Minton Beddoes. Te former is CEO of specialist publisher Future, which last year doubled pre-tax profits to £108m. Te later is editor-in- chief of Te Economist, which last year increased its subscribers by 9 per cent to 1.1m. A fresh wave of digital start-ups has


recently emerged to reimagine the future of news. Justin Smith quit his job as CEO of Bloomberg Media to co-found “a new kind of global news company”. Will Lewis, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, is leading Te News Movement, a social-media- driven news start-up being honed by a young team at the ITN building in London. As recently as 2016, Te Guardian’s media commentator, Roy Greenslade, warned that journalism was being dwarfed by the PR industry but 2021’s growth in jobs has helped to shiſt that balance. Analysis of official labour market statistics carried out by PAN Communications found more people are working as journalists (112,300) than PRs (100,137). “We are seeing both sectors growing, it’s just that the number of people working in journalism appears to be growing more quickly,” says Gareth Tomas, PAN’s managing director. “I think that is a very good thing.” According to an NCTJ study in May, the industry is becoming younger, with the proportion of journalists under 30 increasing from 16 per cent to 23 per cent between 2018-2020, while the proportion over 40 fell from 64 per cent to 48 per cent. Aſter a long period of decline, the news industry is taking on fresh blood. Now it needs the younger generations of readers and viewers to appreciate what it does.


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