The media and PR community is this evening reeling from the news that News International is to cease publication of its most profitable newspaper The News of the World.
The final edition, to be published this Sunday, will bring to an end a 168 year print run. The staff – 200 journalists and 500 people in total – are tonight facing an uncertain future, after a ‘tearful’ Rebekah Brooks broke the news. The editor, Colin Myler, described it as the saddest day in his life stating that the paper was on a high, having recently won 4 press awards and been nominated for a further 11. Its circulation dominates the UK’s Sunday newspaper market with an ABC of over 2.6 million and a readership of 6,500,000 – a whopping 12% of the UK population (data source Metrica / Gorkana UKPulse).
So what has gone wrong? As widely reported the paper’s phone tapping of private calls between at first what appeared to be restricted to royalty, celebrities and politicians has escalated to include hacking into the phones and intercepting the emails of bereaved soldiers families, murder victims and the families of the victims of the London terrorist bombings on 7/7.
There is a school of thought that the first group are fair game, but the violation of the privacy and grief of normal people embroiled in personal tragedy was too much for Britain to bear. Coupled with allegations of bribing police officers and led by Npower, Ford and O2, the advertisers in the paper turned their back on it in disgust. Social media went into overdrive and as Ed Miliband, the leader of the opposition said it’s “clearly people power that has forced this decision… the revulsion people have felt… and the decisions advertisers have been making.”
Phrase cloud from Metrica Radar (radar.btsdev2.co.uk/gorkana/metrica) on the reaction to the closure of the News of the World
All PR professionals know that an organisation’s reputation is crucial to its success. Reputations take years to build but can be lost in a flash – as today’s events have graphically shown.
The mainstream media has come under intense pressure from the disruptive technologies that the Internet has enabled. The explosive growth in on-line media, social media, sharing and aggregation services have led to audience fragmentation, a decline in readership and plummeting ad revenues for publishers.
In response to these threats, mainstream newspapers are competing fiercely for readership. This pressure, especially for the red tops has led to more and more desperate means to be utilised to deliver the latest scoop. And it isn’t just the tabloid press that has been accused of this – for example, Sarah Helm, the wife of Tony Blair’s chief of staff during the Iraq war claims: “We were used to seeing notes that we put in the dustbin appear on the front page of the Sunday Times.” (Coincidentally – or not – also a News International owned publication).
The problem we have here is that the fierce competition for maintaining readership, stoked by the rise of online and social media, has led to practices becoming apparently wide-spread that are not acceptable to the audiences that they are trying to maintain.
One key defence that mainstream and traditional media has always levied at the social media upstart is that it is the medium to be trusted, its stories well researched and its commentary and analysis authoritative. You could trust traditional media in a way that is just not possible with user generated content. So when James Murdoch, the chairman of News International said that the paper had “breached the trust that the paper had with its readers”, the game was up. The paper that specialised in investigating, uncovering outrages and ending careers had had its own terminated in similar circumstances.
It’s ironic that this expose of the News of the Word’s betrayal of trust – its key asset – has occurred in the month that the Guardian has announced that it’s to follow a ‘digital first‘ policy, is considering publishing less frequently but more in-depth content (think ‘Newsnight’, not ‘News at Ten’) and is also looking to open an office in New York to expand it’s on-line readership overseas and try to maintain a profitable business model. The Daily Mail and others are also looking to follow similar policies.
The News of the World’s shameful demise has happened just the day after the Huffington Post has begun operations in the UK. Has the betrayal of trust by the News of the World, and it is feared more of the mainstream media in the UK, hastened the tipping point towards the widespread adoption of social media as a more trusted source? We welcome your views.
