News and Journalism in the UK

Brian McNair

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134128839
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

News and Journalism in the UK is an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the political, economic and regulatory environments of press and broadcast journalism in Britain and Northern Ireland.

Surveying the industry in a period of radical economic and technological change, Brian McNair examines the main trends in journalistic media in the last two decades and assesses the challenges and future of the industry in the new millennium.

Integrating both academic and journalistic perspectives on journalism, topics addressed in this revised and updated edition include:

• the rise of online journalism and the impact of blogging on mainstream journalism
• the emergence of 24 hour news channels in the UK
• the role and impact of journalism, with reference to issues such as democracy, health scares and the war on terror
• trends in media ownership and editorial allegiances
• 'Tabloidisation', Americanisation and the supposed 'dumbing down' of journalistic standards
• the implications of devolution for regional journalists.

1 Why journalism matters

This chapter contains:

• An outline of the organisational structure of the British news media, including details of current ownership patterns, trends in newspaper and periodical circulation, TV and radio ratings and online usage.

In the twenty-first century the production of news, and journalism of all kinds, is big business, and getting bigger all the time. The supply of information (whether as journalism or as rawer forms of data) occupies an industry of major economic importance, employing vast human and financial resources, and enjoying high status. According to a 2007 report by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), there are more than 10,000 newspaper titles in existence, employing some two million people and generating US$180 billion of revenue. Notwithstanding concerns about the impact of the internet on print journalism (see below, Chapters 5 and 7), for WAN these figures indicate that the global print industry is ‘healthy and vigorous’.¹ Across the world, top newsreaders, anchormen and women, bloggers and newspaper columnists acquire the glamour of movie stars and exert the influence of politicians. Media companies such as the BBC, CNN, Sky and Reuters judge themselves, and are judged, by the perceived quality of their news brands in an increasingly competitive and globalised marketplace.

Journalism is also an expanding business. At the beginning of the 1980s there were just two organisations supplying televised news and current affairs to the UK: the British Broadcasting Corporation and Independent Television News. Each provided around two hours of news per day. Now there are three UK-based providers of television journalism accessible to the British audience (BBC, ITN, Sky), transmitting on five free-to-air terrestrial channels, and several satellite and cable channels operated by these and other providers. The number of hours of television news available to the dedicated viewer has increased exponentially as 24-hour services have come on air, and the established free-to-air channels have steadily over the years augmented their services with breakfast news, round-the-clock bulletins and coverage of Parliament. A 2002 Broadcasting Standards Commission/Independent Television Commission (BSC/ITC)-commissioned study found that the provision of TV news had expanded by 800 per cent between 1986 and 2001, from an average of 30 hours per week to 243 hours, including 24-hour channels (Hargreaves and Thomas, 2002).

Radio journalism is also expanding as more national and local channels have been set up, benefiting from the expansion of spectrum provided by digitisation. Radio journalism remains principally the preserve of the BBC, and its Radio 4 and Five Live channels in particular. These compete with talkSport and other commercial channels, which provide varying amounts of news, mostly supplied in bulletin form by Independent Radio News and Sky News Radio.

In print, there are, if one counts such upstarts as the Daily Sport, Sunday Sport and Sunday Star (launched in September 2002), more national newspapers available in the UK than there were 20 years ago. At local and regional level, a large ‘free sheet’ sector exists alongside the ‘paid-fors’.

Last, but certainly not least, Britain has seen an explosion of online news and journalism-based websites. Some of these are produced in the UK, many others overseas. The point about the internet – to which we will return below – is that regardless of where they are produced, online media are global by nature insofar as they are accessible to anyone, anywhere on the planet, who has access to a networked computer (state censorship exists in some countries but becomes ever more difficult to sustain as populations become more skilled at evading it). Thus the Guardian, which had a print circulation in the UK of around 310,000 as this edition of N&JUK went to press, had more than 25 million regular users of its guardian.co.uk online site globally. Many established news organisations, in the UK and elsewhere, have ‘gone global’ in this sense, a fact with significant implications for how they produce and market their content. Since the late 1990s, when the number of journalism-based websites was numbered in the hundreds worldwide, online journalism has emerged as a major news platform in the UK, accessed on personal computers and mobile phones. We will examine both trends – what we might call the globalisation and mobilisation of news, respectively – and their implications for the future of print and broadcast journalism in detail below.

A news map of the UK

Producing all this journalism for print broadcast and online platforms, respectively, is an industry employing some 50,000 journalists in the UK, generating billions in revenue from various sources, including sales and subscriptions, advertising, syndication and other services. The next chapter examines current thinking on how these proliferating journalistic media might affect individuals and social processes. Most of us assume that journalism matters: but does it really, and if so, in what ways?

Before that, however, and as a prelude to the more detailed discussion of trends and issues which make up Chapters 5–9, we begin with a description of the British journalism industry as it was at the time of writing: the types and structures of organisation that provide us with journalistic information; who owns them; the extent of their reach and the size of their audience. In this way, we can draw a news map of the UK (Figure 1.1), beginning with what remains for now at least, despite the migration of readers to new platforms such as the internet and the mobile phone, one of the most popular and pervasive of our news media, as well as the oldest – the press.

The national press

In the UK, as of June 2008 there were 12 national ‘paid-for’ daily newspapers (including the Daily Sport and the Morning Star) with a combined circulation of around ten million (Table 1.1). The largest circulations were achieved by what used to be known as the tabloids, with the Sun enjoying a significant lead over the Daily Mirror/Daily Record, and the Daily Mail in second place.

Table 1.1. Circulation of British national newspapers, 1988–2008

Figure 1.1 A news map of the UK.

Until quite recently, ‘tabloid’ in the UK context referred both to a particular size and layout of newspaper, and also to a particular type or style of popular journalism on either print or broadcast platforms (Engel, 1996; Conboy, 2000). There were ‘red-top’ tabloids such as the Sun and the Daily Star, read largely by socio-economic groups C2DE and notorious for their sensational, often salacious content; and ‘mid-market’ tabloids such as the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, reaching higher socio-economic categories (ABC1 – generally more affluent, better educated sectors of the reading public, estimated to number just over 50 per cent of the population). All other newspapers were defined as ‘broadsheets’, being larger in size and containing more demanding content. In 2003 the fourth most popular daily newspaper in the UK was a broadsheet title – the Daily Telegraph – at that time the only daily broadsheet with a circulation above one million. In January–June 2008 the Daily Telegraph averaged over 800,000 daily sales, and was still the fourth most popular newspaper title. By then, not only was it the most popular broadsheet in the UK, it was the only broadsheet title remaining on the market, all other ex-broadsheets having moved for economic and competitive reasons to a smaller print format (the familiar tabloid as in the case of The Times and the Independent or, in the case of the Guardian, the Berliner format).

The collapse of the traditional tabloid/broadsheet distinction is reflected in the British Newspapers Online website (www.britishpapers.co.uk), which divides newspapers into ‘heavy-weight’, ‘mid-market’ and ‘red-top’. I have previously used ‘elite’, ‘mid-market’ and ‘mass’ circulation categories to describe the three sectors of the UK newspaper market (McNair, 2000).

Red-tops and mid-market titles also dominated the Sunday market in 2008. Of 11 national Sunday newspapers available to the British reader (including the Sunday Star, launched in September 2002), four of the five most popular in terms of sales were in these categories.

The 2008 figures provide only a snapshot of the national newspaper market as it was during the six-month period of January–June that year, and thus tell us nothing about longer-term trends. Over the 20-year period between 1988 and 2008, there has been a consistent decline in the circulation of many British newspapers, particularly those popular titles, like the Sun and the Daily Star, which operate at the more sensationalist end of the market, although the latter was showing signs of resilience as this edition went to press (Table 1.1). The mid-market Daily Mail has bucked the trend of tabloid decline, and is one of the few titles actually putting on daily sales (some 200,000 extra by 2008) over the period.

The elite titles, or heavy-weights, have done better on the whole, with The Times up by more than 20 per cent over the period. the Financial Times shows a circulation increase of 63 per cent in two decades, when one includes over 300,000 overseas sales (not shown in Table 1.1, which is UK only).

While total UK newspaper sales have fallen by around one-third over two decades, and many commentators have identified a circulation crisis (see Chapter 6), this has not affected all newspapers, nor all equally. What emerges, looking at 20 years of circulation figures, is that decline of newspaper circulation in the UK has averaged around three per cent per year for ten years and more, and that combined daily circulations in 2008 are around 66 per cent of what they were in 1988. The circulation of Sunday titles is around 56 per cent of 1988 levels. This is bad news for some titles, such as the Daily Mirror, which has slipped to below the Daily Mail, and the Daily Express, which lost more than half of its circulation in that period. But decline should be seen in the context of broader trends in the media environment. Newspapers now compete with many more information outlets than was the case 20 years ago, and just as the big free-to-air terrestrial TV channels have seen their audiences whittled away by the proliferation of new cable and satellite channels as well as the growth of online services (see Chapters 7 and 8), the UK press, like that of other countries, has had to deal with a reduced share of the overall media market. Against this background, it would have been surprising had they not experienced some loss of audience share. What matters for the UK press in the coming years, as we shall see, is how they meet the challenge to old-established business models that is posed by the rise of online and real-time 24-hour journalism, and if they can retain their traditional presence in that world.

For now, many UK newspapers remain profitable, as business managers have exploited new technologies to cut costs and improve margins (regional newspapers were working to 30 per cent profit margins on titles as recently as 2008, when the ‘credit crunch’ and global financial crisis of that year began to affect bottom lines everywhere), and few observers believe that the newspaper in print form is doomed to extinction any time soon, given its uniquely user-friendly properties as a platform for the distribution of journalism. For all that, audiences for news are migrating to PC and mobile platforms, especially younger audiences – the convenience and tactility of print, rolled up and placed in one’s pocket on the underground or the bus, or spread out on the coffee table on a Sunday morning, will not easily be matched by laptops, e-readers or mobile devices, at least not in the professional lifetime of most journalists working today (nor indeed of readers of this book).

Ownership of the British press

Ownership of the British national press continues to be concentrated in the hands of a few publishing organisations (Table 1.2). The largest, News International, is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, whose two daily and three Sunday newspapers accounted in 2008 for 34 and 39.6 per cent of total UK circulation, respectively. The Trinity Mirror Group, formerly owned by the late Robert Maxwell and now administered by a consortium of banks and other financial institutions, accounts for a further 17 and 18.5 per cent of daily and Sunday circulation, respectively (substantially down on the 2002 figures used in the previous edition of this book).

Table 1.2 Ownership of the British National Press, 2002–08

Other major owners include Richard Desmond’s Northern & Shell, which in 2000 purchased the Express and Star titles for £125 million; the Barclay brothers, who bought the Daily and Sunday Telegraph from the disgraced Conrad Black’s Hollinger group in 2006; and Associated Newspapers (the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday).

The Guardian and the Observer remain ‘independent’ insofar as they are owned by shareholders organised in such a way – through the non-profit-making Guardian Media Group and the Scott Trust – as to guarantee the editorial integrity and financial independence of the paper ‘in perpetuity’. In 1991 the Independent and its sister publication, the Independent on Sunday, having struggled since the 1980s to retain the independence that inspired their launch, found themselves in such financial difficulties that they were required to modify their constitutions and allow foreign investors to purchase substantial stakes in the papers. In 1998 the Independent titles passed into the control of Irish entrepreneur Tony O’Reilly and his Independent News & Media group, where they remain as of this writing. The Morning Star (formerly the paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain) struggles on in the post-communist world, owned by its readers and relying on them, rather than on advertising revenue, for funds to sustain its print run of about 13,000 copies.

By comparison with figures for ownership cited in previous editions of this book, there has been no fundamental change in the degree of concentration that has historically existed in the UK. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation remains the (marginally more) dominant force among five big players and a few smaller, but still substantial owners such as the Guardian Media Group, and with roughly the same share of circulation as its four titles had in the 1990s. Some big owners – Conrad Black, most notably – have gone (in his case, to a US prison, convicted of fraud), to be replaced by others (the Barclay brothers who, having sold the Scotsman titles to Johnston Press in 2005, purchased Black’s Telegraph titles for £700 million). Their share of national circulation, three per cent, remains as it was in 2002. Associated’s share has gone up, as has that of Northern & Shell.

The regional press

For the regional press in Britain, the past two decades have seen a period of expansion, particularly in the market for small, community-based papers funded entirely from advertising revenue – the ‘free sheets’. There are now dozens of companies publishing hundreds of these newspapers across the country (nearly 600 in 2006). Although their main function is to advertise local businesses and services, most contain a certain amount of local news with which to attract the attention of potential readers, and so can legitimately be included in any discussion of British journalism. Local newspapers are also a major employer of the UK’s journalists.

In the late 1990s, a network of Metro publications, owned by Associated Newspapers,² was established in several British cities, including London, Glasgow and Manchester. By 2008 there were Metros in 16 UK cities, reaching millions of what marketing experts call ‘young urbanites’ going to work between the hours of 6: 30 and 9: 30 am. Their success has inspired the launch of competing free titles by companies such as News Corporation (the-londonpaper). In August 2006 Associated launched another free title, London Lite, to run alongside Metro. I discuss the implications of this trend below. Here, we note that the growth of the free newspaper has added further to the challenges facing the traditional print journalism industry in the UK, and is certainly a factor in the declining circulation of paid-for newspapers, especially those in the regions (see Chapter 9)....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figures and tables
• Preface to the Fifth Edition
• 1 Why journalism matters
• 2 Journalism’s social role
• 3 Journalism and its critics, (I) – the view from the academy
• 4 Making news – approaches to the sociology of journalism
• 5 Journalism and its critics, (II) – beyond the academy
• 6 Print journalism in the UK
• 7 Broadcast journalism in the UK
• 8 Online journalism in the UK
• 9 The regional story
• 10 Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography