The Hybrid Media System

by Andrew Chadwick

  There are some signs that internet use is displacing time previously spent by the British public on other media, though typically the patterns are unclear and television news is retaining its dominance in key respects. In 2009, non-internet users spent an average of twenty-five hours per week watching terrestrial television, but internet users spent only fifteen hours per week. Equally significant are the different usage patterns that appear to be opening up between the internet and television. Thirty percent of those who use the internet perceive it to be their most important source of information—ahead of television (11 percent), newspapers (seven percent), and radio (six percent) (Oxford Internet Survey, 2009: 33). According to the Oxford Internet Survey of 2007, among internet users, levels of trust in the internet as a source of information were higher than for television and newspapers (Oxford Internet Survey, 2007). And yet the flagship British television news shows remain remarkably powerful. Following a period of decline in the 1990s, between 2004 and 2009 the scheduled news bulletins on the major terrestrial channels—BBC1, ITV, Channel 4, and Channel Five—lost only 200,000 viewers. Younger people are much less likely to watch television news, raising the question of whether these age groups will eventually adopt the habits of their parents, but overall there has been no dramatic systemic decline in the audiences for British television news since the early 2000s (U.K. Office of Communications, 2010). Television has adapted. We also need to unpick those data from 2007 about levels of trust in the internet as a source of information, because in Britain the highly trusted public service media organization, the BBC, has, over the last fifteen years built its own gigantic online presence.

  It does seem clear, however, that television’s traditional monopoly on news is loosening, not only because online news sites are more prepared to take risks by publishing stories without the standards of verification usually required of professional journalists, but also because the horizontal nature of social media communication now means it is much more likely that news will spread across interpersonal networks before official press releases are issued. Some big political news stories now break first online and are picked up by television and print journalists who obsessively follow their e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, and blog feeds in the hunt for new leads. I cover these dynamics in much greater detail later in this book.

  At the same time, however, major British television and newspaper journalists like the BBC’s Political Editor Nick Robinson and ITV’s Business Editor Laura Kuennsberg have adapted and now often “scoop” themselves by releasing their own stories online long before they officially file their reports or go into the newsroom to record a broadcast package for the evening news. And it must also be noted that the large, dedicated news organizations, particularly the BBC, share vast amounts of content internally across their web and television divisions. This provides them with an ongoing structural advantage when it comes to breaking news. While British newspapers and commercial broadcasters are certainly under pressure, BBC broadcasting is in a stronger position, largely as a result of the publicly funded license fee. Despite complaints of unfair competition, the BBC continues to build a sophisticated web presence which, by 2011, was attracting more than forty million monthly unique visitors (Shearman, 2011). It has adopted many of the features used by other news organizations, such as stories with comments, message boards, and chat rooms, and it also integrates citizen-generated video into its news narratives, especially during exceptional events: good examples include the London underground bombings of 2005 and the G20 protests of 2009. The BBC also has the hugely successful iPlayer, which runs on computers, mobile phones, and tablet devices, but is increasingly integrated into new televisions, satellite and cable television set-top boxes, gaming devices such as Microsoft’s XBox and Nintendo’s Wii, not to mention a whole host of devices like the Slingbox or Apple TV that enable users to send streamed video wirelessly from their computers or smartphones to their television screens.

  Television therefore shows signs of resilience and of the successful creation of reserved domains of power. The story is more complex for British print media. Nowhere have the pressures of the changing media system been more strongly felt than in the British newspaper industry. Declining print edition circulations, increasing online readerships, competition from free papers and online news providers and blogs, shrinking and more thinly spread advertising revenues, and the economic recession of the late 2000s have all taken their toll on traditional British newspapers. And yet, even here there is an important story of adaptation and continuing power.

  Like their American counterparts, for whom the pressures are eerily similar, British print media are in the middle of a painful transition toward new models of organization, production, and distribution. Part of this story is now familiar. Readership of print editions across all newspaper sectors has been in decline for several decades due to competition from television. But the internet accelerated this trend and introduced new forces. As in America, British newspapers’ initial reaction to the internet in the 1990s was to ignore it in the hope that it might prove to be a fad. This was soon followed by a strategy of placing the content of the printed version of a paper onto a website in the hope of attracting sufficient “eyeballs” to generate advertising revenue. Some papers, such as the Financial Times, experimented early on with subscription models, only to scale these back due to a lack of subscribers and the lure of the advertising model when times were good during the economic boom of the mid-2000s. When times got hard during the advertising recession of the late 2000s, they tried again with the pay-per-view model. Many local and regional papers either lacked the resources to develop their own websites or stayed out of the game entirely for fear that they would cannibalize their print editions. The circulations of British local and regional printed newspapers fell by almost 40 percent between 1989 and 2009 (U.K. Office of Fair Trading, 2009: 12).

  It now seems clear that the pay-per-view model can be made to work online where an outlet has a distinctive niche, as is the case with the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. By April 2012, almost half (47 percent) of the Financial Times’s paying readers subscribed to its digital editions (Financial Times, 2012). It remains to be seen whether more general news outlets can also make this model work. In June 2010, two of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation’s online news sites, the Times and the Sunday Times, were placed behind a “paywall.” By January 2012, the Times had 119,255 digital subscribers, of whom roughly half were iPad users, and a print circulation of 405,113. However, print circulation of the paper has also declined steeply since the digital subscription model began. For example, it fell by 24,441, or 5.7 percent, during just a five-month period from September 2011 to January 2012 (O’Carroll, 2012). The other national newspapers have experimented with paid models, but none has chosen to follow the Murdoch press. Even the Daily Mail, whose online offerings have soared in popularity both in Britain and abroad over the last few years to reach more than fifty million monthly visitors by 2012, remains wedded to its print edition and its website advertising-and-eyeballs model, not least because the web edition only generates 2.6 percent of the Mail’s total revenue (Economist, 2012).

  Google now dominates the online advertising market, but online the revenue per reader is substantially smaller than for traditional printed classified advertising. Ceding in-house control over advertising mechanisms to an external company (Google) with a near-monopoly in its market is also unattractive for newspaper owners and editors. At the regional and local levels, where 80 percent of papers’ income derives from advertising, the press have long relied upon classified ads to sustain themselves, but revenues from these have almost halved since the late-1990s, due to competition from online outlets such as eBay and Craigslist (U.K. Office of Fair Trading, 2009: 10).

  There are signs, however, that advertising-and-eyeballs may soon start to pay off. By the mid-2000s, spending on internet advertising as a whole had eclipsed spending on print advertising. By 2011 it had also eclip
sed spending on television advertising (Sweney, 2011). News consumption habits among the British are also shifting. In 2007, the number of internet users who reported that they read a “newspaper or news service” online stood at 30 percent. In the space of just two years, this number almost doubled, to reach 58 percent (Oxford Internet Survey, 2009: 32). More generally, by 2009 75 percent of internet users reported reading news online, though this included non-newspaper sources such as blogs (Oxford Internet Survey, 2009: 20). Most strikingly, the growth in newspapers’ online editions contrasts starkly with the decline of their printed editions. According to data from the UK Office of Fair Trading, from 1987 to 2007, annual sales of national newspapers declined by roughly a third. Between 1998 and 2007 sales fell quite sharply for the print editions of all the national papers except the Daily Star and the Daily Mail (U.K. Office of Fair Trading 2008). Yet during the 2000s the websites of all of the national newspapers saw massive growth, with the Mail and the Telegraph more than doubling their monthly unique users in just a two-year period between 2008 and 2010 and the Guardian showing strong growth in its online readership (Chadwick & Stanyer, 2010). Now, about one-fifth of the Guardian’s revenue comes from its online news and two-thirds of its approximately thirty-two million monthly visitors are from outside Britain, with one-third living in America. Many newspapers are adapting and are now beginning to consolidate their roles as some of the most powerful players in online news (Economist, 2012).

  An example of the enduring power of the traditional newspapers but also of how this power is refracted through the prism of the hybrid media system is the furor over British MPs’ expenses in 2009—arguably the Westminster Parliament’s most serious crisis since the emergence of British democracy. Huge quantities of data on MPs’ expenses claims were leaked from Parliament in digitized form on optical discs. The Daily Telegraph took the initiative, with its decision to purchase the discs for £150,000 and to run, in print and online, an extended series of revelations about MPs’ fraudulent expenses claims, spanning almost three weeks in May 2009 (BBC News Online, 2012). The newspaper employed a team of researchers who took a total of ten days to sift through the data and extract the most damaging documents. The paper also carefully staged each day’s new releases to cause the maximum impact on other media. Frequent television appearances and blog posts by the paper’s political columnist, Benedict Brogan, were a key part of this. Broadcast news and political blogs engaged in a sustained feeding frenzy as day after day MPs’ expenses were the top story across all news outlets. This was an example of “old-fashioned” and well-resourced investigative journalism, but with a difference: the hybrid media system accelerated and amplified the news and distributed the information across all platforms. As the Telegraph released information online and in printed form, other news organizations were able to pick up the new revelations and run their own stories. And, in a final twist, some weeks later, when Parliament officially released what amounted to 458,000 pages of data, the Guardian symbolically thumbed its nose at the Telegraph by starting its own “crowdsourcing” campaign to publish yet more revelations. In a response to Parliament’s censoring of the files, the Guardian published the entire database on its website and invited ordinary readers to identify, log, and discuss the MPs’ expenses claims. By November 2009, its readers had reviewed 225,000 pages (Guardian, 2009). So in addition to revealing the ongoing influence of older media logics, this episode also revealed the growing importance of the internet, not just as a channel for the communication of information, but also as a mechanism of organization and networked collective action in the creation of news. This is one of the key aspects of media system hybridity I explore throughout the rest of this book.

  The older British news organizations have also responded to the threat of blogs and social media by appropriating internet genres as a way of generating audience loyalty. A key development is online social interaction. Despite early resistance during the 1990s and 2000s, during the last half decade interactive commenting spaces have flourished in online news. Space for reader participation is now less tightly restricted and reader’s views are much more visible across all online news platforms. All of the major British news sites now have well-established interactive features, such as op-ed columns with open commenting, message boards, and blogs. The major newspapers’ and the BBC’s message boards receive hundreds of thousands of comments per month. Readers are also now encouraged, and sometimes paid, to submit video footage and other user-generated material to news sites. Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr are important trawling grounds for professional journalists looking to source pictures and video. National news organizations are also attempting to position themselves as online social networking hubs, where, in addition to reporting and debating political developments, a reader can post pictures, socialize, or even set up a date. In 2010, the websites of the Daily Express, the Star, and the Daily Telegraph began allowing their readers to set up their own blogs. The adaptation of news organizations to the digital media environment is creating new opportunities for citizens to engage in political debate and express their opinions in new environments like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, but these spaces are also now occupied by and in some cases directly provided by older media actors.

  This is not to say that alternative online news sites do not attract significant audiences or exercise meaningful power. Some high profile British blogs attract a relatively large readership. For example, Paul Staines’s Guido Fawkes blog attracts around 350,000 unique visitors per month and regularly averages 100,000 daily page views. In 2008, Staines had a 2.3 percent share of overall blog visits in Britain and another Conservative blogger, Iain Dale, had a 1.9 percent share. Though these are small audiences when compared with those for blogs at the BBC and the Guardian, which had a combined 33 percent share over the same period, things are surprisingly finely balanced. If we set aside the BBC and Guardian blogs, alternative online news looks remarkably competitive, because Dale and Guido Fawkes have never been too far behind the mainstream newspaper blogs of the Times and the Telegraph (Goad, 2008).

  A further factor here is that cost-cutting has contributed to the undermining of the authority of professional broadcast and newspaper journalism. Creating timely, relevant, and challenging news is an expensive business, especially if a story involves an investigative element. However, the revenues to support this kind of activity have been falling for several years. Almost all commercial news organizations and the BBC have seen deep cuts and radical restructuring of staff and budgets (Davies, 2008). Writers and editors in what were once powerhouses of in-depth reporting and commentary, such as the Observer and the Sunday Times, now sit side-by-side with upstart individual or group blogs, most of which have a keen awareness of niche interests and very short news cycles. The top political bloggers in Britain regularly produce articles that are indistinguishable from those published in the op-ed sections of newspapers. Bloggers have low overheads and some have large readerships, solid advertising revenues, and other sources of income that they derive from their role in the hybrid media system, such as appearance and speaking fees. Freed from the bureaucracy of the professional newsroom, some bloggers are also able to conduct background investigations and move among political and media elites, as we shall see at various points throughout this book. One example is Paul Staines, whose long-running series of exposés about former Labour government minister Peter Hain in 2008 culminated in damaging revelations about the origins of donations to Hain’s campaign fund for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party. These were partly instrumental in Hain’s decision to resign his ministerial post and this was widely reported as the first victory of the British “blogosphere.”

  There are limitations, however, to interpreting episodes like this solely as the result of the heroic power of online media. During the spring of 2009, the leak to Staines of an e-mail exchange between Gordon Brown’s special advisor Damian McBride and former Blair adviser turned Labour blogger Derek Draper shed an unf
lattering light on Downing Street’s approach to media management. “Smeargate,” as it became known, revealed a plan by McBride to establish a supposedly independent website called Red Rag that would contain personalized attacks on leading Conservative politicians and their families. The story was shaped by the interaction of older and newer media logics. It involved a right-wing blogger, (Staines) whose website, Guido Fawkes, emulates classic British tabloid journalism, with its mix of innuendo, gossip, and rumor. But Staines’s “scoop” was dependent upon the support of two traditional British newspapers, for Staines did not publish the contents of the Draper–McBride e-mails on his blog but instead handed them to journalists at the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times, who duly broke the stories and shared the credit.

  An often-rehearsed criticism of bloggers is that they are “amateurs” who lack the professionalism and ethical standards of trained journalists (see for example Keen, 2007). Bloggers have been accused of being less discerning in what they publish and as likely to disseminate unsubstantiated political gossip as much as genuine political news. However, some of the popular British bloggers have now moved toward hybrid, semi-professional models of organization along the lines pioneered by the Huffington Post in the United States (discussed below), or they have been co-opted in the service of professional journalism. In 2011, successful Conservative blogger Iain Dale set up a “current affairs mega blog” which has a group of almost seventy writers. And in 2012, Paul Staines started writing columns for the print edition of the established newspaper, the Daily Star.