ABSTRACT
As this edition went to press, the production of news and journalism in the UK, and indeed their consumption, were in the midst of profound and farreaching structural change. The rhetoric of crisis and the narrative of decline around journalism, so common in media scholarship over the years, was in this period justified by the trends I have described in the previous chapters:
declining newspaper circulations, averaging around 20 per cent in two decades and proceeding at around 3 per cent per annum
declining audiences for broadcast news on free-to-air terrestrial TV channels declining levels of trust in broadcast journalism, especially that of the BBC.
Concern about the capacity of the UK ‘national’ media to adapt to the growing complexity of the political environment in Britain, and adequately to cover devolution in particular, was widespread. As Chapter 9 shows, this was emerging as a key political as well as cultural issue for the UK’s news media, an issue that would continue to be at the top of the agenda until at least the devolved elections of 2011 and the expected UK general election of 2010. More immediately, in the case of the press and commercial broadcast jour-
nalism, declining audiences were leading to declining advertising revenue at a time when the global and UK economic environment was worse than at any time since the early 1990s. For commercial TV news, in addition, the end of analogue broadcasting and the completion of switch-over to digital in 2012 had made the traditional business model untenable. The rise of the internet was having an impact on both press and commercial TV, as was the growth in mobile platforms for the consumption of news (laptops, mobile phones, PDAs). These trends, as we have seen, were generating serious problems for managers and editorial teams as they struggled to adapt. Job losses, multimedia integration, new ways of working – all were contributing to an atmosphere of crisis in the journalism industry. As we have also seen, however, the emerging environment was one that
offered opportunities as well as challenges and threats to established providers and ways of doing things. By 2008, British journalism was firmly embedded within a globalised public sphere comprising not just print and broadcast
media, but 24-hour news and internet platforms. These had dramatically expanded the quantity (if not necessarily the quality) of journalistic information available to the average UK citizen, and diversified the range of sources of news. This was an environment in which more information flowed more quickly than at any time in human history, along channels and through network nodes of unprecedented interconnectedness. Moreover, the online environment was one in which non-journalists had
unprecedented access to the production of news, and not merely its consumption. By 2008 all major news organisations in the UK had set themselves up to receive and integrate the contribution of video and audio materials from the public at large – what had become known as ‘citizen journalism’ or user-generated content. We have seen how Sky News and the BBC have embraced the evident desire (and now, through mobile phones and digital cameras, the capacity) of ordinary people to be part of the journalism production process. Journalists, for their part, have been required to learn how to produce material across print, broadcast and online platforms, and to engage with their public in new ways through podcasting, blogging and other techniques. Amidst all this activity, which is radically transforming the production-
consumption patterns of news and journalism across the world, there is absolutely no evidence that people are bored with this particular form of cultural output, or that it is becoming less important within the cultural and creative economies of the world. On the contrary, as Tim Gardam put it in 2006, in words which are even truer today:
