Meet the press

During the weekend, a few stories appeared following meetings Stephen Timms had with some of the national broadsheets last week.  Of course, newspapers tend to follow angles depending on their readership or general editorial drift, so you can end up with four different articles based on very similar conversations. And there’s nothing wrong with that – one of the strengths of a democracy, you might argue.

One point that came up in one of the interviews was about the future of the press itself. What is the government’s policy towards changes in media markets? In the Digital Britain Report we set out some of our decisions on the merger regime for local newspapers, but arguably the issue goes much wider and the real story is about a downward trend in the profitability of newspapers as a business. 

In one way, this is as digital as you get. Saving the ‘dead tree’ news seems to go against the grain of Digital Britain. But it’s not so much the smudgy ink that people think is valuable, as the journalism that it passes on, and here is where the concern arises. 

Attitudes towards newspapers (which are usually august, corporate establishments – very much part of the Establishment in some cases) can be pretty stark. Bloggers in particular can seem to relish the difficulties the print titles are having, and modestly put themselves forward as the future.But to my mind it’s a bit more complicated than that. As much as some bloggers jeer at the press, they seem to relish being talked about in the press. A story which gets picked up by the mainstream seems to gather some extra legitimacy.

And, arguably, the medium works best when it is the story: in other words, people on Twitter tend to talk an awful lot about twittering and how important it is. Even in the recent Welovethenhs affair, much of the story was about Twitter itself as an organising tool. So for blogging and social media to truly replace newspapers, maybe the awesomeness of how the news is delivered needs to slip into the background a bit compared to what the actual news really is. Maybe it never will.

All of which poses some interesting questions. If five national newspapers announced tomorrow that they would be giving up and going out of business, should the Government care? Should it do anything about it, and the trends which lead us that way? And how do we square that with the drive to digital?