Print journalism in the UK

As this edition went to press, print journalism in the UK was grappling with a number of significant challenges to its economic well being, and to its traditional place in the British media landscape. These included a long-term, steady decline in newspaper paid-for circulation, linked to the rise of the internet and the migration of readers away from print to other platforms for news delivery; and the rise of the free-sheet sector, which by 2008 accounted for more than four million of the newspapers read in Britain every day. This chapter explores those challenges, as well as the regulatory and legal issues affecting the British press, highlighted in March 2008 by the fining of the Express and Sunday Express for their coverage of the Madeleine McCann case. Chapter 9 tells ‘the regional story’. In this chapter we consider those print media of UK-wide reach.

It has been argued that Fleet Street, the historical centre, physically and figuratively, of the British newspaper industry – ceased to exist on 26 January 1986, ‘the day on which Rupert Murdoch proved that it was possible to produce two mass-circulation newspapers without a single member of his existing print force, without using the railways and with roughly one-fifth of the numbers that he had been employing before’.1 The flight of News International’s

newspaper production from buildings in the City of London to a custom-built, high-technology ‘fortress’ at Wapping in London’s Docklands was, on one level, the entirely rational and, as it turned out, highly profitable act of a ruthless and hardheaded publisher. But it also, in combination with the actions of another media entrepreneur, Eddie Shah, set in motion processes that, according to one viewpoint, revitalised a moribund, loss-making industry and created the conditions for its profitable expansion in the late 1980s and 1990s and beyond. An opposing view asserts that the ‘Wapping revolution’ in fact did nothing to address the long-standing problems of the British press, particularly those of concentration of ownership, right-wing political bias and deteriorating editorial standards. This chapter assesses these contrasting interpretations of what has happened to the British press since 1986, and considers how the industry was affected by the Wapping revolution. Before that, however, we should perhaps answer the question, what was wrong with the British press anyway?