Is the problem that people don’t want to pay for news or don’t want to pay for newspapers?
Each round of newspaper circulation figures makes grim reading for anyone trying to balance the books at a newspaper. Month after month circulation is dropping away across the board. The usual explanation is that newspapers are suffering because so much free news is now available online, and there is certainly a large degree of truth in that.
However, there are two important caveats to that. First, the massive lack of trust in journalists, who are regularly rated one of the least trusted professions in the UK. As I wrote last year on this topic,
Isn’t a major reason that people increasingly turn elsewhere for news that they don’t trust the quality of what comes from traditional and paid-for sources enough above those other sources? “Pay for news from us because it’ll be accurate” could be a good sell. If people trust you.
(As an aside, it looks as if this his how The Times is trying to position itself compared to The Telegraph, with The Times‘s rather more balanced political coverage during the general election and since. The Times was in a very different league from The Telegraph with stories such as its misleadingly truncated data, page 1 splash despite admitting not knowing the truth or double-standards on tax.)
The second caveat is that though newspaper circulations are dropping, many magazines carrying news and current affairs are seeing circulations rise, as was the case with the latest ABC circulation figures – and this was no flash in the pan as it’s the continuation of an existing trend.
So is the problem people’s unwillingness to pay for news, or is it that newspapers are stuck in the wrong format and wrong styles?
I stopped buying newspapers in the 1980’s because of the one-sided reports, not only on political issues but more importantly on general news items.
I would like to think of myself as reasonably educated enough, to hear the whole truth and to make up my own mind about the story. Rather than being spoonfed the opinions some Fleet St hack thinks I ought to have.