Is journalism over?

Obviously, yeah, but here are 1500 words on it

A couple of weeks ago, New York Magazine published a feature titled, Can the Media Survive? 

I gobbled it up because it was a question that has been rattling around my mind for months now. 

I'm sure you are well aware of just how in peril the industry is but here's a quick recap of my own experience. 

I used to work for a “midmarket” (but really tabloid) newspaper in the UK. This paper and its sister paper were seen as the sturdiest of the UK's newspapers. It had a massive globally successful website. It wielded true political power - for better and often for worse, it set the news agenda. Moreover it had an owner with deep pockets and, as I said, it looked like the most financially robust of all the nation's newspapers. 

Until, well, it wasn't. Declining print readership, a cost of living crisis that made the newspaper ever more expensive to produce as profits dwindled, and the growing realisation that digital advertising revenue, even at one of the world's biggest websites, was not going to cut the mustard, left the newspaper with (apparently - and I do actually believe that this was the case) no choice but to drastically cut staff. 

The whole features team was axed - I was one of those casualties - specialised reporters lost their jobs, subs were laid off. The newspaper has limped on but it is clear (I would say) that its days as a separate operation from its sister paper and that massive website are numbered. The bosses have realised (shockingly late, it has to be said) that giving away content for free online in the hope that advertising revenue will make up the difference is a failed model. A paywall has now been installed on the site with all the best stories available only to readers who pay the monthly subscription fee. 

I was told that a particularly well performing story had brought in 100-odd subscribers which had got the powers-that-be excited - most stories only bring in six or seven paying subscribers. 

When I heard these numbers, I realised how bleak the outlook is. I felt the same way when, with the furore over the Washington Post withdrawing its endorsement for Kamala and the subscriber exodus that followed, it was mentioned that before the debacle the new British publisher of the publication had touted the paper's net gain of 4,000 subscribers as noteworthy. 

These are puny numbers. A newspaper, even in these cut back and lean times, is expensive to run and these kinds of numbers of paying subscriptions (many of them on deeply discounted or fully free trials) are not going to get anywhere near the kind of dosh required to keep these operations chugging on. 

For now, Jeff Bezos seems content to bankroll the Washington Post, a paper that lost almost $80m last year. But I worry for any business reliant on a billionaire's interest and willingness to soak up losses of tens of millions of pounds. On this side of the pond, the supremely wealthy Evgeny Lebedev clearly got tired of financing the Evening Standard, which lost £21m last year, and he closed it down, replacing it (for now) with a weekly edition called the London Standard. 

None of this news gives me any pleasure. I know people who lost their jobs at the Evening Standard and people who are still there, but unsurprisingly feel that their employment is precarious. All around me, the industry feels in freefall. I just went on Press Gazette - journalism's trade website - to double check some stats as I was writing this and I spotted their lead story: Observer staff have been warned that 'difficult decisions' lie ahead if the Tortoise deal to buy up the title doesn't go ahead. 

It is both terrifying and a little surreal to feel like an industry - a proper industry - that you've invested in and worked in and climbed up some ladders in, is, quite simply, cratering. It is rather like a video game where every day you have to dodge mines and bullets to make it through to the next round. We freelancers are struggling but even those lucky enough to have staff jobs right now are living with the constant anxiety that their job may well be on the cutting board tomorrow.

In the New York Magazine piece, an off-the-record media exec said: "I think you'd have to be crazy to begin a career in journalism right now."

But here's the thing - for once, I can't argue that the CEOs are being greedy or laying off people unnecessarily. I kind of get it - mainly because I see in my own life: no one wants to consume the news through legacy media organisations anymore (or perhaps more accurately, the number of people who want to do so is rapidly, rapidly shrinking). I very rarely meet someone my own age, who does not work in a job where they are required to keep up with the news, who actually pays for a subscription to any news organisation. And here's the thing, increasingly, I am finding that I'm not even fucking checking the news.

Here comes the uncomfortable truth-telling portion of this essay, I have several news subscriptions (because y'know I am a journalist and also, y'know, they're tax deductible baby) but I’m checking them out of a sense of obligation rather than a twitchy desire to get them open on my phone! I mean, I certainly check Youtube (gah, I'm addicted guys) and Instagram daily, I have a poke around on Twitter, and erm, in none of this information consumption are you seeing a legacy media corporation. When I'm in work mode and trying to be conscientious, I will click open a couple of broadsheet apps but there’s no itch to scratch there, really.

And I'm not alone! I had lunch with someone high-ish up at a national paper the other week and he admitted to me that, while in the past he had religiously bought a physical copy of the Sunday Times and spent a morning luxuriously devouring it, he couldn't remember the last time he had done so. 

I mean, if journalists can't even be bothered to read a bloody newspaper, what clearer sign is there that it's over?

So how did we get here? 

Well, it's all thanks to that blasted invention, the internet, which crushed the old advertising business. Newspapers lost their classified ads, the local papers lost their monopoly on certain regions. But also, the tech companies built a better advertising model. It's called “targeted” advertising. So, if 20 years ago, you wanted to sell golf balls, you bought an ad in Golf magazine; now you buy a Facebook ad targeted to people who have just taken out golf-club memberships. (Great example that Nicholas Thompson, CEO of the Atlantic, explained in New York Magazine.)

Marie Le Conte wrote a brilliant substack about the decimation of the media and she pointed out: "The horrid and irksome reality is that journalism is failing as an industry because the world doesn't really need us anymore."

Yikes. And she's right. When I need to know what foundation I should buy, I go to my favoured beauty Youtuber, not to the beauty editor of Style magazine. When you want to know what's the hot restaurant in London, you'll probably see it in your Instagram feed, before you read about it in the London Standard. If you want a new book, you may scroll through Amazon reviews (though this has its pitfalls as I will explain below!) and not read the Guardian books pages. 

Even arenas that once seemed to completely belong to papers, magazines and broadcasters are being eroded. I'd argue that increasingly the coverage of world conflicts is happening on social media, both from people commenting and analysing what's going on but also from people who are on the ground, caught up in the conflicts, sharing their experience. Politics is also moving away from legacy media. Think about this election battle between Trump and Harris - two of their biggest interviews (Trump with Joe Rogan, Harris with Call Her Daddy) weren't with the legacy media but with independent podcasts that didn't exist 15 years ago - six years ago in the case of Call Her Daddy. 

So what is the future? It's clear that all the newspapers are betting on subscriptions as their only way out of this God-awful mess. But, as Sewell Chan of Columbia Journalism Review pointed out in NY Mag: "A sustainable business model for journalism is going to need people willing to pay for five or seven or ten news subscriptions instead of one or two." And do you see that happening? Because I don't. 

For some journalists, the future is Substack - Jim Waterson resigned as media editor of the Guardian to start the Londoncentric on Substack (side note: I've been loving it. I really enjoyed reading Jim's stuff when he was at Buzzfeed, it was so fun and inventive and the Londoncentric feels like a return to that.) I remember thinking it really said something if he, as media editor at the Guardian, fancied his chances out on the choppy seas of independent journalism rather than inside the union-protected Scott Trust-funded publication.

Perhaps - well actually, it's not perhaps, it's a definite - the future is podcasts and Youtube videos and TikTok and it's all about niche-ing down. 

We've reached that part of the essay where I'd like to present you with my point but I can't find it, in all honesty. 

I am sad that journalism is cratering. I do worry what our society will look like without poorly paid hacks raising important but boring issues in local papers and keeping tabs on politicians and their expenses, but I'd be lying if I told you that was my foremost sorrow. The truth is, journalism is such fun. It will never not blow my mind that there exists (or at least, once existed) a job where you get to talk to people (more often than not, people who are either interesting or had something interesting happen to them), ask them whatever questions you'd like, and write it up - and someone would pay you for that! What a dream. And I'm sad that it feels like it's time to wake up. 

In my hopeful moments, I feel like something else will somehow come along. Some of the executives in the NY Mag piece shared this hope. Graydon Carter, legendary editor of Vanity Fair, posited that the news media business is… “Going to hell in a handbasket. There may be, down the road, a way out of it, but I just don’t know what that is.” In my more despairing moments, I think, “Well, I guess everything crumbles into the ocean eventually.”

Recommendations

An anti-recommendation

So, I've been listening to The Rest Is Entertainment (a great podcast, and hereby proving my point that podcasts have replaced traditional media) which has Richard Osman as a host. I liked listening to him and thought I'd give his book The Thursday Murders Club a go. I was in the mood for a cosy, Agatha Christie-style thriller - you know, nothing too gory or violent but sweet, English, murder but with afternoon-tea-thrown-in vibes - and this book had a staggering 157,955 ratings with an average of four and a half stars given. That's really good! So I bought it and was excited to get lost in a good old thriller. 

Well, guys, this book was just so mid - so self-consciously British, coy and twee, with no real satisfaction when the murderer is revealed and just - well, what a let-down. All I could think was: what were those 157, 955 readers thinking?! 

And then, this quote from Peepshow, swum into my mind. "People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. You can't trust people, Jeremy." Go ahead and watch the whole episode (season 3, episode 2), it's on Netflix, it's fan-flipping-tastic.

The Apprentice

This is a film - v topical! - that charts the rise of Donald Trump. I saw it last weekend at Genesis Cinema - is there anything better than going to the cinema on a cold drizzly evening, filling up a pick n mix bag with sweets, and chomping away in front of a great film? And this film really is great. It is incredible really - at one point, I found myself rooting for Trump. I whispered to my friend Jennie, “my God, I think I might actually fancy Donald Trump”, but then you see him turn monstrous - but then, the question is, is he the monster? or is 1980s capitalism the monster? Very fun, slick, sexy film - enjoyed it and recommend it. 

This red lentil dhal

The days are shorter, the nights are longer, we're all colder: it's time to make dhal. And this recipe in particular! It's not even written by a chef, it's a member recipe, but it is so good. The dhal takes hardly any time to make - just chopping up onions, frying them off in spices, adding the lentils and stock and coconut milk - but it makes the most delicious and cheerfully coloured bowl of creamy goodness and apparently lentils are packed with protein and just generally very, very good for you. It also freezes beautifully.

Ok, guys, that's it for me this week - I'm sorry I've been away so long and I've loved writing this to you. Will I be more consistent going forward? Hope springs eternal! Have a fabulous week and see you next time xxx