It’s not just Party A vs Party B, it’s the public vs the newspapers

In the past, if you read something in a newspaper that you disagreed with, that was pretty much it. A very small number of people were moved to write to the paper and a few very rarely moved to stop buying it. But it was essentially a personal, private matter – grumble a bit, mention it over coffee to someone and then the world moves on.

Courtesy of social media, there is increasingly a different pattern: grumble online, see other people also grumbling online, grumble some more and hey presto – the complaints reach a much wider audience as online word of mouth spreads the word.

There is a classic example of this old versus new media conflict at work today. Following his surge in the opinion polls, Nick Clegg on the morning of the second TV debate faced a barrage of attacks from a number of British newspapers, including The Sun, Daily Mail and Telegraph. Probably weirdest amongst these attacks are those over a newspaper article Nick Clegg wrote and had published in a national newspaper eight years ago.

So outrageous was this article that, er…, it took eight years for the Telegraph and Mail to get round to reporting it.

One reaction to this has been a burst of spurious other ‘shock revelations’ posted to Twitter but people angered by the newspaper industry’s behaviour – with the hashtag for these messages #nickcleggsfault making it into the Twitter worldwide trending topics list. (See the Metro’s report for a selection of the best and this post for the meme’s origin.)

As previous incidents such as the Jan Moir controversy have shown, a sudden upsurge of popular opinion via social media can at times be too much for the traditional media establishment to ignore.

The big danger for several newspapers this time round is that they are already rated the second-least trusted profession in the UK in MORI’s annual trust surveys (only just beating politicians) and they are facing steady falls in the number of people willing to buy their content. Being the brunt of such public anger and ridicule may firm up support and sales from their core audience – or may further damage their reputation and feed further declines in sales.